Three billion tweets and tens of millions of tips ought to add up to something. In Foursquare's case, that means the "Best of" series, which highlights "the most awesome places in cities across the U.S."
Locals know best. That's the reason Airbnb just acquired Localmind, an expert at connecting inquisitive travelers to locals in the know.
Farmigo sets up an online farmers market with its database of farms, software platform, local food evangelists, and $8 million.
Foursquare is checking into Yelp's territory with the addition of ratings to its listings.
Guest Post Out-of-home ads, such as those on billboards, transit, and street benches, may get a lot of eyeballs, but they can't account for our preferences. Mobile can.
How do you succeed online in the crowded, noisy, and sometimes scammy local search market? If you're Stik.com, you succeed by focusing on transactions that are infrequent, expensive, and have a high cost of failure.
Guest Post After more than a year on the Groupon beat, I'm retiring. But I have one final question for Andrew Mason.
Zaarly, the online marketplace where users find and hire talented local builders and artisans, is announcing a new “Zaarly Anywhere” initiative that allows any site to enable offline commerce from online content.
This comes just a month after the local …
Guest Post
Since the mid-1990s, entrepreneurs have been trying to tackle the local market. Many have failed. Others, like Yelp and Groupon, have been successful selling services to small businesses, but those services are of dubious value. (Disclosure: I have puts against …
Bing and Yelp have cozied up to bring a sweet, sweet search baby into the world. Now, Bing searches will feature brief reviews and more relevant information for decision-making for all kinds of local businesses.
The new “Powered by Yelp” …
Guest Post
Have you had the feeling the quality of Groupon deals is going down? If so, you’re right. A report released this morning by Giorgos Zervas, a postdoctoral fellow of computer science at Yale University, shows that the average rating of …
Getting enough data to make local recommendations has proved tough. A restaurant reviewer writing for a local newspaper might write a hundred or so reviews a year. Zagat might cover several thousand in its printed books. Yelp provides near universal …
After an accounting restatement, a shuffling of its board of directors and Groupon's stock falling to below 50 percent of its initial public offering price (and 66 percent off the high it reached on its first day of trading), Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wrote a letter to shareholders yesterday to try to swing the momentum back in the company's favor.
The other day, I tweeted “I should be able to ban anyone who rates Applebee’s 4* from ever influencing a Yelp result for me.” That sentiment touched a nerve among my followers. Shervin Pishevar of Menlo Ventures coined it “ …
I've spent much of the last year talking about how the sites small businesses rely on to advertise and promote themselves -- think Yelp and Groupon -- are failing them. In fact, helping small businesses at the local level is extremely challenging for technology companies, for the following reasons:
Editor's Pick
With the rise of mobile marketplaces, outsourcing tedious or mundane tasks to a willing gopher has never been easier. Thursday, one startup seeks to make these mobile conveniences less intimidating for the masses.
Zaarly, one year after making a splash …
Editor's Pick
One of the most interesting mobile apps to come out of the Occupy Wall Street protests was Vibe, created by Hazem Sayed, which allowed users to send anonymous messages in a tightly controlled distance. Betaworks recently bought the company, and …
In what could be the deal of the year, Groupon has snatched up a little-known startup to help it do the dirty work of targeting deals to subscribers.
The newly public deals behemoth has bought two-year-old, New York-based Hyperpublic for …
Foursquare is attempting to make the unfamiliar less mysterious with the addition of familiar nearby places to hundreds of business pages Friday.
Foursquare, the New York-based location check-in startup, gives merchants the ability to operate their own business and brand …
Stealth startup Nextdoor believes it has cracked the social/local code, and is today launching a digital platform that brings together your real-world neighbors.
Nextdoor is creating the “neighborhood graph” by combining the best of Web 2.0 sites like Yelp and …
