Good luck to these folks. Sometime ago I was thinking about ethnic restaurants in my area and got interested in exactly this: what is the best location for a particular ethnic restaurant. For just this one domain there are a lot of variable to consider, so it'd be interesting to see how PiinPoint is doing it as they are not domain specific, and how effective their solution is.
Regardless, this is a great problem to solve and wish them all the luck.
Interesting opportunity but unfortunate name selection. PiinPoint with two i's is always going to be tricky to try and tell somebody. It even took me a couple of occurrences in the article to realize it had a double i since the brain tends to automatically filter out duplicate unexpected letters.
The other problem is that PinPoint.com is owned by Microsoft who will probably never be interested in selling it. So even after getting funding you won't be able to move over to a better url.
But why pick a name that could be confusing if you don't have to? And even if it is in writing, it is still confusing since the double i is hard for the brain to see and is automatically corrected by most spellcheckers I tried.
I think the rationale is that humans learn when something is interesting or by making a mistake. With PiinPoint, a potential customer will either make a mistake with the spelling and eventually figure out the correct spelling and "learn" it. Or when someone is giving a referral and they say "PiinPoint and 'pin' as two i's" then that's an interesting spelling and sticks with the person receiving the referral.
Interesting! I'd love to see how they're building their decision up.
Nielsen offers the reverse of this service to large multinationals so they can determine where to send their sales reps (like Coca-Cola wanting to know where all the new convenience stores in Africa are).
