Touting its special focus on the San Francisco Bay Area, new portal GenieTown is launching today with a listing service that might be helpful the next time you need a cabinet maker, gutter cleaner or wedding photographer.
Like the Yellow Pages or Yelp, GenieTown is primarily a list of different service providers, with ratings from customers. However, it’s added another feature: the ability for people in need of a service to post projects for contractors to bid on. That part of the business model is similar to Elance or Guru, two services that list projects for professionals to bid on.
The online market for freelance professionals — for example, software coders or technical writers — is, in fact, already pretty well developed. What GenieTown hopes to do is open up a market for blue-collar and technical workers, who have continued to rely on the local phone book for their business.
It’s a good idea, from a consumer standpoint. When my house flooded during a recent downpour, it wasn’t easy to figure out exactly what kind of plumber or technician to call. Granted, there also wasn’t time to sit around and wait for bids to roll in for a project (stop the damned leaks!), but it’s easy to imagine a scenario where it would have been useful — like the ensuing cleanup.
And from a pricing standpoint, if GenieTown is successful, it might shake up entrenched businesses. Just as Guru has dropped the pricing floor on many writing projects, GenieTown could help drop the cost of services well known for their expense — again, plumbing is a good example.
In the short-term, though, GenieTown is unlikely to spread outside of a few cities that are large enough to have the Internet-savvy workforce needed to support it, as it plans to try to do in a few months. There are also some real-world complications. Few good contractors want to bid on a project before seeing the site in person; the system could also encourage unskilled workers who hurt the bidding process by consistently underbidding skilled shops.
In the meantime, check out the video below, from GenieTown’s community site, where experts can share their tips. Believe me, it’s worth paying attention to those small leaks.
One Comment
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ITrush said:
Cool, it’s another great place for finding help and connecting to consumers.
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Web RoundUp: Feb 20, 2008 : unitedBIT said:
[...] Palo Alto-based GenieTown launches as a public beta its local services marketplace, a so-called hybrid love-child of a trio of services: the Yellow Pages, Craigslist, and eBay. It claims to mate the A-to-Z system of the first, plus the localism of the second, and the “long tail-ness” of the last, and brings the benefits of each together to give people the option to find plumbers, electricians, and emergency Web developers without trying too hard. The GenieTown site allows local service providers (plumbers, dentists, whatever) to put up a web presence. Users looking for providers can find them, based on their location and user rating. The site competes on one end with services like (gulp) Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp and of course the Yellow Pages (both online and off). All of those services are great places to find local service providers. GenieTown also allows people in need of a service to post projects for contractors to bid on. That part of the business model is similar to Elance or Guru, two services that list projects for professionals to bid on. In other words, what GenieTown hopes to do is open up a market for blue-collar and technical workers, who have continued to rely on the local phone book for their business. Eventually GenieTown says they’ll integrate more closely with service providers to coordinate calendars and booking systems. At that point they’ll run into another group of competitors, including recently funded Liberysy. And GenieTown is also trying to engage with users on more than just making introductions. The smartest part of the service, according to Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, is a Q&A area that will do very will with search engine optimization. Furthermore, as Paul Glazowski of Mashable says, GenieTown is presently targeted for services and service seekers mainly in the San Francisco Bay Area. So Kansans and Alabamans aren’t going get much out of GenieTown from the start. See the review from Mashable!, TechCrunch, and VentureBeat [...]