Posts Tagged ‘yelp’

Last week, the search engine giant Google announced its acquisition of the prestigious restaurant rating organization Zagat. Google executive Marissa Mayer stated that Zagat will become a “cornerstone” for Google’s local services division in the near future.
“Their iconic pocket-sized guides with paragraphs summarizing and ‘snippeting’ sentiment were “mobile” before “mobile” involved electronics,” continues Mayer. Read the rest of this entry »

Looks like the daily-deal market is losing significance to some of the major players in the market: shortly after Facebook’s announcement to suspend their daily-deal program, the rating community Yelp is following suit. Well, not quite as extreme, but 50% of the workforce has been cut back. Yelp said that it is going to be focusing on “good” deals instead of having no choice but to offer those with an “inherently declining quality.” Read the rest of this entry »

The rating community Yelp has expanded the local coupons for its iPhone and Android apps. Up until now, the special offers and check-in deals were available, but users can now click the “Deals” icon on-the-go to search for deals on-the-spot and use them right in the location from their mobile devices.
About a year ago, Yelp brought out the “Deal of the Day”, which was its answer to the online coupon hype. Now there are about twenty metropolises deal offerings available. The mobile coupons are definitely stirring up a commotion in the couponing competition and joining the bandwagon in location-based services. The user number are definitely making a point: Yelp counted 50 million users just in the month of May, and 4.5 million mobile users.

In mid-November, the internet giant Google launched a recommendation platform with its new service Hotpot. With the release, a wave of competition drive has swept over online networks. Hotpot highlights ratings from friends in localized searches, and is integrated with Google’s local directory service Places. Read the rest of this entry »

Gowalla has been creeping further and further away from the pure check-in concept, especially since they started allowing videos and pictures to be posted in March. Now, the company is developing the fresh new “Highlights” feature into an attractive alternative to Google Place Pages: City Pages. For corporate customers, the company has some more new ideas. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the club: now the rating community Yelp is offering a “deal of the day”. The start-up is just in San Diego. Next in line are New York and San Francisco. Read the rest of this entry »

Technically, Google seems to have finally gotten it: whoever wants to win over the middle-class has to work for it. Somehow, the idea has caught on that the world doesn’t belong to Google, as a new “service-offensive” shows. Read the rest of this entry »

Google is still treading on eggshells when it comes to its social media route. Wave has finally been put to rest and Places is getting an extra treat for business owners: they can now directly respond to user ratings. Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare was given an estimated net worth of 100 million US Dollars by investors, who decided to pump in an additional 20 million into the American company. With such a strong support system, the company can surely rest a bit more soundly, but the location-based check-in service will need to use their new capital wisely if they want to keep up with their competitors. Foursquare apparently is one step ahead of us and already has an idea of how to make itself stand out in the crowd: the gaming element of the service should be getting a major facelift to become more entertaining for the user. This information was confirmed by Foursquare engineer Anoop Ranganath in “The Big Money’s Disrupters” podcast. Read the rest of this entry »

Foursquare has been at somewhat of a standstill for quite some time now. The check-in features, which have already been outdone by social-network Twitter’s location features, rating service Yelp’s check-ins, and will probably be looking at the same situation when Facebook releases their own check-in service. So how exactly does Foursquare plan on surviving? The answer is quite simple: gaming. Read the rest of this entry »