Posts Tagged ‘yelp’

Google, concurrently with its bid for local review site Yelp, is reported to be in “on again, off again” acquisition talks with real estate listing giant Trulia. Kara Swisher of CNET News reports this, at the same time disclosing that her wife is VP of new business development at Google. While Google is not disclosing any money figure, CNET sources put Trulia’s worth at $150-$200 million.

With Trulia’s ongoing evolution and burst of traffic  – including wide use of Google Maps - this acquisition would seem to be an excellent mesh.

Two companies providing online real estate listings have won WebWare’s 2009 “WebWare 100” prize: ZipRealty and Zillow. For the latter, WebWare cited Zillow’s ability for visitors to ask questions of sellers or agents without having to register. 

ZipRealty is a full-service, residential brokerage operating in 36 U.S. markets.

In the location-based services category, Yelp won a spot. Craigslist kept its place in the “commerce” category.

Not surprisingly, Facebook, MySpace and Twitter all claimed spots in the social and publishing category.

Not making the cut – Trulia in real estate, and recruitment portals JobCoin, JibberJobber, and JobScore, all of which were nominated (see our story here).

The full list is here.

Advertisers on job search engine Simply Hired will now have to spend a minimum of $500 per month. It’s a surprising move. Rival Indeed.com has no advertising minimum. Neither does Google AdWords.

The new fee came at the same time as a crackdown by Simply Hired to remove listings from other sites the company believes are posting either fake listings or repackaging listings from other sites as their own. Simply Hired is also removing listing that are “artificially modified” (according to the company’s FAQ) – for example via keyword stuffing. Additionally, jobseekers who click through on a job ad can’t be required to register to see the full ad, according to the FAQ.

All this is causing confusing among job boards, some who suspect Simply Hired is removing their listings because they won’t pay the $500 minimum (we reported on a similar uproar over at business ratings site Yelp where some stores alleged that Yelp was forcing them to pay to remove negative feedback).

Cracking down on job ad copying is a tad ironic given that’s Simply Hired’s basic business model – to aggregate ads from other sources (although, of course, SimplyHired forwards clicks to the originating site).

Pity the poor business that gives bad service. Yelp, the Web site that lets users review businesses, has updated its mobile version so that iPhone owners can post Twitter-like 140 character quick reviews while they’re actually in the establishment, rather than waiting until they get home. That means if there’s a fly in your soup, Yelp readers will know about it in real time.

If you’re more ambitious, you can compose a full review on your iPhone and post it later when you get back to your main computer and the Yelp Web site.

Going the other way, Yelp’s mobile app uses GPS so that reviews, tips and photos will pop up wherever you are, letting you decide which trendy wine shop to visit before you even walk in the door.

There’s even a Facebook style “feed” where you can see what your friends are reviewing.

Yelp is definitely onto something. Already, the company’s iPhone app accounts for five percent of Yelp’s overall traffic (about one million monthly visitors).

We wrote about Yelp and mobile competitor CitySearch previously.

Yelp has made an about-turn in its long-standing policy of preventing businesses from responding to disparaging reviews made on the Web site. Starting next week, small business owners will be able to publicly counter user-generated reviews.

Yelp was accused in February by a local Oakland, Calif. newspaper of “extorting” businesses by charging them to “move” bad reviews lower down on the list. The new move should put that rumor to rest.

Yelp, which launched in 2004,  has angered many small businesses because it has not allowed them to respond to reviews, as TripAdvisor and other review sites do.

Yelp’s co-founder and chief executive, Jeremy Stoppelman, had said that this was to protect the voice of the consumer.

Next week’s change is part of a gradual maturation for the site. A year ago, Yelp started allowing business owners to update their businesses’ profile pages and privately contact reviewers.

Yelp is stressing that the new policy is intended to allow business owners to correct inaccuracies, provide their side of a story or explain how they have fixed a problem. If a business uses the site inappropriately, by using comments to advertise or to make personal attacks, the comments may be taken down (Yelp will not screen comments but rely on users to flag offending ones).

Like a restaurant? Tell the world while you’re still finishing your ravioli.

Citysearch is taking on Yelp in the fast growing iPhone software space. Both companies now have their own iPhone apps. Citysearch is brand new; Yelp has been out a scant two months ago and is already the iPhone’s third most popular travel app (after Urbanspoon and Google Earth).

Both Citysearch and Yelp use the iPhone’s GPS to let you find nearby restaurants, bars, clubs, hotels, and stores. You can rate and review the places you visit too. Soon you’ll be able to take pix and movies and upload those too.

Note to wait staff: really mean it when you say “how may I serve you today?”

A Yelp-like local reviews site clone called Qype has been growing aggressively in Europe and has designs on other continents including South America. Will the U.S. be next?

Qype, a German startup, has a strong presence in England, France and Spain in addition to its home country. A Brazilian site was recently launched. The company’s traffic is good: 6.3 million unique visitors a month across its network, says the company’s CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher.

Qype doesn’t have any immediate plans to hit North America. Its main competitive differentiation from Yelp is its multi-lingual capabilities which suggest there’s lots of room to grow without taking on Yelp directly.

Qype is planning to launch an iPhone-enabled app later this month; Yelp already has that running.

Qype has a decent sized war chest. The company closed an €8 million round in September, and has raised €13m to date.

Yelp is often dismissed as a bar and restaurant site for recent college grads in San Francisco. But, according to new stats released by the company, only 45 percent of reviews on the site are for restaurant, the arts or nightlife.

The rest?

23 percent are for shopping, eight percent of reviews are for beauty and fitness, seven percent are for home and local services, four percent are for health, three percent are for travel and hotel, and a final three percent are for auto.

College grads 23-29 make up up the majority of users at 37 percent, but there’s a fair sprinkling of older fogies: 36 percent are between 30-39 and 12 percent are 40-49.

IAC’s local online guide CitySearch has launched its first major redesign in nearly a decade. The move is aimed at competing with more aggressive newcomers like Yelp. The revised site tried to strike a balance between user-generated reviews and its own editorial reviews.

CitySearch is now in beta (see http://beta.citysearch.com/ – the old site automatically redirects here) and has added new social features such as classifying reviews by members, as well as more detailed search functionality (there are 140 local city guides covering some 75,000 cities and neighborhoods).

Perhaps most interesting, CitySearch now is integrated with Facebook so that you can import your Facebook friends and automatically post stories you write in CitySearch to your Facebook wall which can be shared with your Facebook friends.

Recognizing the power of the iPhone, CitySearch also has a new mobile version – see http://m.citysearch.com/.

Local service provider reviews are taken from InsiderPages which CitySearch bought last year. InsiderPage will live on as a separate brand.

IAC in its Q2 08 earnings call said that CitySearch was to do over $100 million revenue in 2009. With the economy in the dumps, the company may not make those numbers, but we’ll certainly be watching.

You found a handyman on Craigslist who sounds great on paper. But how do you know he’s any good? A new startup, Workstir, hopes to take some of the guesswork out of the search process.

The site, a kind of Craigslist/Yelp/EBay hybrid, lets you post your ”looking for” requests to a forum where service providers can contact you directly through e-mail. Each service provider has its own Workstir profile with pictures, interests, and most importantly, reviews from other Workstir users who have dealt with the provider in the past. Service providers can receive mobile alerts so they can quickly respond.

Workstir is essentially a free version of the already popular Angie’s List which charges $5.25/month to consumers to browse. Service providers can list for free but only after they’re recommended first by a member. Angie’s List has some impressive numbers: 750,000 members submitting 40,000 reviews a month. There’s also a “penalty box,” a kind of wall of shame where bad companies go to die.

Workstir as a free Angie’s List is a good idea, but as with any new site, the proof will be in the number of reviews that appear on the site.