End-of-life planning startup eFuneral has received a $250,000 investment to help people find resources online for funeral planning including funeral home reviews, estate planning, and cemetery information.

Cleveland-based eFuneral was launched in February 2012 by cofounders Mike Belsito and Bryan Chaikin with the intention to help professional funeral planners, people who have just lost a loved one, and those interested in long-term planning.

“This industry is completely antiquated,” Belsito told VentureBeat. “We saw a big gap and decided to make a better solution.”

While one could look at the service as potentially taking advantage of grieving folks, it doesn’t charge families for most of its features. The site makes much of its revenue from partnerships with end-of-life organizations such as cemeteries, estate planners, and life insurance agents. It also charges funeral homes $200 a month for premium memberships and better placement in search results.

Belsito appears to be quite sincere when it comes to helping people with his business. He spends some of his time each day on the site answering questions in a chat bubble for families about how the site works and what resources they might need at that moment. (I can confirm this because he popped up in a bubble when I visited the site for the first time.)

One of the reasons Belsito is so sincere about helping people is because the company’s genesis comes from an incident two years ago when Belsito’s cousin passed away. Belsito’s cousin was in his 40s with some health problems, but the family was not ready for when he passed away suddenly.

“We didn’t expect to come home and find him dead, but that’s what happened,” Belsito said. “There were six funeral homes in two-mile radius from where we were. We thought there would be more information online to figure out where to go, but there wasn’t. … It was frustrating that were more reviews online on Yelp about where to eat dinner then there were about places to go for end-of-life help, which is much more consequential.”

Today’s investment came from nonprofit venture organization JumpStart, which has made investments in 72 early-stage Northeast Ohio companies. Prior to today, eFuneral had raised $260,000 in seed funding and loans from 10Xelerator, Innovation Fund of Northeast Ohio, and others, as well as an undisclosed investment from Flywheel Ventures, Hatch Partners, and others.

“Prior to the existence of eFuneral, the end-of-life marketplace lacked an organized single source of relevant, easy-to-understand information,” JumpStart partner Mark Smith said in a statement. “However, the company’s offerings are flexible to an individual’s specific needs, comprehensive enough to cover all aspects of the planning process, and clearly organized on a well-designed website.”

The new investment will be used to increase the sales and marketing of the service and to develop the site further.

Coffin with flower arrangement via Robert Hoetink/Shutterstock

My question: Won’t Facebook Graph support this kind of thing natively?

The app is basic and beautiful, providing a gorgeous full-screen window into the restaurants you and your friends visit, with large images, a map view, and simple ratings capability. You can share recommendations, discover new spots, and yes, memorialize your inner gourmet.

Source: OpenTable

Places I’ve Eaten

What it makes me think, however, is: Why now?

Why is OpenTable, probably the largest restaurant reservation service available, with its 27,000 restaurants and 400 million users, releasing a Facebook app? Sure, Facebook is the place where well over a billion people get together and talk about their day, including where they ate, but that’s been the case for some time now.

My guess — and it’s just a guess — is that Facebook Graph has a lot to do with the genesis of this app.

Facebook Graph has the potential to replace a huge swath of the local-search, local-events landscape that OpenTable, Yelp, various Yellow Pages incarnations, and other companies service. Places I ate at would be a simple search in Graph, as would places my friends ate at. Implementing this potential, of course, is a whole other thing. And exploiting the financial opportunity is yet another.

So Facebook has a long way to go, and partners will continue to be important for the social network for a long time.

But make no mistake: Facebook is the big kahuna in social, and Graph is the path that will help it monetize that status. As such, services like OpenTable and Yelp and at risk.

Which I’m pretty sure is not lost on them.

photo credit: » Zitona « via photopin cc

The new search feature will be interesting for people who just want to find out interesting things about their friends or get together a Tolkien-loving crowd for an LOTR video-watching marathon. But what it’s really going to do is open up the vast hoard of Facebook data and eat the lunch of a thousand large and small companies that make money by aggregating and rating what people do and where they go.

Here are just a few examples:

Yelp

Yelp is essentially a social business directory with ratings, strong in entertainment industries like restaurants and bars, but growing in local services like home and automotive and beauty. Now Facebook’s Graph Search will let a billion-plus people type in search queries like: ”Restaurants in San Francisco liked by Culinary Institute of America graduates.”

Likes are much lower-fidelity than reviews, but still: watch out, Yelp. (Yelp’s stock just tanked.)

TripAdvisor

I guess having a partnership with Facebook and being one of the first travel sites to integrate with Facebook’s “instant personalization” back in 2011 is not enough to stop Facebook from competing with you.

All that new local search capability that competes with Yelp is also relevant to TripAdvisor. Hotels in New York that my friends like? Most popular vacation destinations in North America?

And it’s not just about what you and your friends like — Facebook explicitly referenced ”Bars in Dublin liked by people who live in Dublin,” which is a promising way to find the places locals like, explore the world, and find the best places to visit.

Plus, it’s only a hop, skip, and a jump from that to full-on booking the hotel or setting up a reservation with the restaurant, all within Facebook.

Yellow Pages (and any other local search apps)

OK, so maybe the printed Yellow Pages are passé.

But millions still visit YellowPages.com, which had over 30 million unique visitors just last month. Once there, they’re looking for dentists and carpenters and mechanics and decorators and roofing companies: all the local services that haven’t, by and large, adopted Facebook pages and hard-core social media campaigns yet.

Now Facebook will let you find ”Dentists liked by my friends,” and any other service category you can think of. RIP single-function local search sites and apps?

Apple’s Siri

The least of what Siri does is help you phone Mommy without dialing.

The vision for Siri is that as a full-fledged personal assistant, she can help you book hotels, get a restaurant reservation, and find you the best information about what to do and where to go. Siri is a key part of how Apple is fighting Google’ dominance in search.

But now Graph Search from Facebook has the potential to get better answers and find more relevant places, because it has access to a wealth of data Siri can never see.

Can you imagine Facebook releasing a companion app sometime with natural spoken language support and booking deals in place with entertainment, travel, and service industries? I can.

And, of course, Google

Google is the king of search, but Facebook took a little potshot at the giant today by talking about the “difference between web search and Graph Search,” saying that Graph Search is designed to “show you the answer and not links to answers.”

The hope for Facebook here is that if users can search for all the things they want and need inside Facebook; they will never need to leave. And Google, with its Facebook-wannabe Google+, will be starved of searches and then starved of revenue.

. . .

More companies than these will feel the impact of today’s Graph Search announcement, I’m sure. Add your thoughts in the comments.

But one caveat: Until we can get our hands on Graph Search and play with it hard, it’ll be tough to tell how much of this is real and and how much is potential.

One thing is for sure. It’s going to be interesting.

Image credit: Meghan Kelly

If your answer is never, you’re probably 75 or older and think “yelp” is a sound a dog makes.  But for the rest of us, we know that reviews are critical in influencing purchase decisions.  So critical that someone even started a business writing favorable book reviews called GettingBookReviews.com (charging, of course, $99 a pop).

If you’ve ever thought about paying for inauthentic endorsements like this, you better pump the breaks because third party review sites are now making it as obvious as Snooki’s spray tan that you’ve invested in fake reviews.

Yelp recently created consumer alerts for business pages that remain for 90 days when they sniff out phony reviews. The alert reads the following: “We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business. We weren’t fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the rules.”

Similarly, TripAdvisor says they have “zero tolerance for fake reviews.” If they believe that a hotel review is contrived, they will remove the review, ensure that the property is penalized in the site’s rankings, and possibly even post a message alerting millions of travelers on what they’ve found.

Considering the clout online reviews hold in consumer purchase behavior, it’s no surprise that some business owners feel compelled to invest in sham reviews:

• A one-star increase on Yelp leads to a 5% to 9% increase in revenue (source: Michael Luca, Harvard Business School).
• 70% of global consumers trust online reviews, an increase of 15 percent in four years (source: Nielsen).
• 80% of consumers change their mind after reading a single bad review (source: Cone Communications).
• One negative review can cost you 30 customers (source: Convergys).
• 7 in 10 who read reviews share them with friends, family & colleagues thus amplifying their impact (Deloitte & Touche)

But here’s the bottom line:

A few “positive” reviews won’t stop customers from continuing to complain about your crappy service or overcooked food. Instead of taking the easy (and sleazy) way out, listen to the concerns your customers are voicing and improve your business. Social media and third party review sites have put the power in the hands of the consumer. Forever. If companies don’t become customer-focused, customer-centric, customer-obsessed, they risk tarnishing their brand reputation and ultimately, losing their company.

 How to improve online ratings the honest way

The problem that many business owners face is that reviews on third party review sites might not legitimately reflect the satisfaction of their customers. Many know they have happy diners or guests; but as the saying goes, “Haters gonna hate.” Pissed off customers are sometimes more inclined to write a damaging review while the satisfied customers will recommend the restaurant or hotel at a cocktail party instead of putting their praise online.

Here’s the solution:

Find those customers who are enthusiastic about your brand, product, or service (AKA your authentic Brand Advocates), and make it drop dead easy for them to write raving reviews.

1. Ask your customers via email, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, website, or elsewhere: “On a scale from 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our brand to your friends?” Those who answer 9 or 10 are your Advocates.
2. Give Advocates the tools to rate and review your product or property, or direct them directly to the relevant third party review site where they can give you a 5-star review.
3. By identifying your Advocates, you’re creating a virtual marketing force that you can leverage for much more than just reviews. They’ll gladly share offers or other announcements like a new location opening, a new chef, or a remodel of your hotel with their social networks. They’ll create personal stories about how they rekindled their love at your resort or made a new friend with one of the gregarious employees who waited on them.

Whatever you do, don’t pay for reviews or recommendations of any sort. There is no longer room for businesses that don’t understand the importance of authenticity and transparency in the era of social media.

Instead, tap into the enthusiasm of your highly satisfied customers and empower them to fight negative word of mouth for you.

By Cara Fuggetta, Marketing Manager, Zuberance (@carafuggetta)

photo credit: Dave77459 via photopin cc

The voice of reason, The Village Voice is not.

“Best of” lists are everywhere, but the Voice has decided to lay claim to the “best of” phrase, and it’s suing reviews company Yelp for use of the presence of these seemingly generic words on its website.

Village Voice Media Holding owns the registered trademarks for “Best of Dallas,” “Best of San Francisco,” “Best of Seattle,” and several more city-themed “best of” phrases. It filled suit against Yelp last week for infringing on 10 of its “best of” marks, and it’s asking for treble damages (or triple the amount of revenue Yelp makes from infringing on the marks), attorneys’ fees, and an injunction to prevent Yelp from continuing to use the “best of” marks.

The Village Voice said that it sells advertising against its web pages running “best of” lists. Yelp, the Voice argued in the suit, is hurting the publication’s capability to generate revenue, harming the Voice‘s reputation and causing consumer confusion. The Voice will be damaged by “loss of reader loyalty, adverting sales, and profits,” according to the document.

Why Yelp in particular? Part of the problem, it would seem, is that the Village Voice has iPhone and Android apps that dole out the “best” recommendations for things to do and see in cities across the U.S. Care to hazard a guess as to what that app is called? That’s right, it’s called “Best Of,” and it competes head-on with Yelp in the local recommendations category.

This isn’t the first time the Voice has gone after a “best of” infringer. Paidcontent pointed out that Village Voice Media Holding sued Time Out New York last year.

The Yelp suit is below. I won’t lie — it’s not a titillating read, unless, of course, you take pleasure in flamboyantly worded (and laughable?) accusations such as this: “Yelp has irreparably damaged the valuable reputation and goodwill of VVMH and its ‘Best of’ marks.”

[via Paidcontent]

Courtroom image via Shutterstock

Business reviews company Yelp has started affixing the equivalent of a scarlet letter to the pages of vendors that try to game its review system by inappropriately garnering stellar ratings.

The company announced Thursday that it posted an impossible-to-miss, red consumer alert on nine business profile pages to warn visitors that “shady practices may be at play.” Viewers are presented with the alert before they can read a violator’s Yelp reviews.

The red warning reads:

We caught someone red-handed trying to buy reviews for this business. We weren’t fooled, but wanted you to know because buying reviews not only hurts consumers, but also honest businesses who play by the results. Check out the evidence here.

The shame-on-you message will be visible to the public for 90 days. Yelp plans to publish these alerts on offending pages as it uncovers evidence that businesses are repeatedly paying for reviews, vice president of consumer and mobile products Eric Singley said in a blog post Thursday morning.

“We want to make sure consumers are making informed decisions. Yelp’s automated review filter is working around the clock to flag these types of biased reviews, and we believe that you deserve the right to know when this type of activity is taking place behind the scenes,” Singley explained of the company’s combative decision.

Singley also promised to provide consumers with additional information on vendors’ gaming tactics. Yelp will eventually let its users know if a large number of reviews for a business originated from the same IP address, he said.

“To help put this in perspective, the large majority of businesses on Yelp play by the rules and work tirelessly to provide the best customer service and products to their clients,” Singley added.

The company’s campaign for public awareness around review quality comes shortly after becoming the default reviews provider in Apple’s Maps application, a responsibility that both companies likely take very seriously. Yelp is home to more than 30 million reviews.

“Rest assured we are not going to let a few bad apples spoil the bunch,” Singley said.

Dunce cap image via Shutterstock

Defying the depressing trend set by Groupon and Facebook, Yelp’s share price lifted more than 22 percent today following the expiration of the company’s first lock-up period.

Roughly 53 million Yelp shares were freed for trading Wednesday as company insiders received their first crack at cashing in on the business reviews site.

From the looks of it, when given the opportunity to take their money and run, early investors and executives maintained most of their holdings. The collective vote of confidence catapulted Yelp shares to $22.37 at market close, up from $17.51 at market open. In total, 8.6 million Yelp shares were exchanged on the New York Stock Exchange today.

Michael Pachter, the managing director of equity research at Wedbush Securities, said that the positive activity amounted to the market’s relief that insiders didn’t dump their shares on the lockup expiration.

“The company is more disciplined than Facebook or Zynga [and] has its insiders behaving well,” Pachter told VentureBeat.

Yelp’s strong performance seems even more impressive when compared against Groupon and Facebook. Both of the consumer Internet companies were hit hard as soon as their initial lockups expired. Peter Thiel, Facebook’s first outside investor and a member of the social network’s board, sold a majority of his holdings in the company as soon as he could. Silicon Valley investment firm Andreessen Horowitz disposed of its entire stake in Groupon for a tiny profit.

Some of the optimism around Yelp can be attributed to a strong second quarter earnings report, which handily beat Wall Street’s expectations. In Q2, Yelp’s first full quarter since its initial listing, the company grew revenue 67 percent year-over-year and posted a smaller-than-expected loss.

YELP data by YCharts

Photo credit: Yelp/Flickr

Business reviews site Yelp has today made a stronger second impression on Wall Street with its Q2 2012 statement, its second earnings report as a public company. The company handily beat expectations by posting $32.7 million in revenue and a smaller-than-expected loss of $2 million, or $0.03 per share, for the quarter.

In Q2, Yelp’s first full quarter since listing on the New York Stock Exchange, the company grew revenue 67 percent year-over-year. Wall Street was anticipating revenue of $30.53 million and a loss of $0.06 per share.

Yelp grew monthly unique visitors to 78 million in the quarter, showing 52 percent year-over-year growth. The company also increased its massive reviews repository to 30 million, up 54 percent from the same quarter last year. Yelp mobile apps, meanwhile, were used on roughly 7.2 million unique mobile devices, the company said in its earnings release.

“Yelp’s second quarter performance highlights the underlying power of our model,” CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said in a statement. “By focusing almost singularly on cultivating rich, authentic local content, we have created a unique platform that is rapidly becoming the de facto local search engine for connecting consumers with great local businesses.”

Stoppelman, in a call with investors and analysts, indicated that Yelp is only partially monetizing its mobile offerings through ads displayed on its mobile website. He said that click-through rates are higher on mobile and mentioned that adding advertisements to Yelp’s mobile apps is a high priority for the company.

Yelp went public on March 2 and received a very warm welcome from investors, despite only bringing in $83 million in revenue for all of 2011 and posting a $16.86 million loss for the year.

The stock has fluctuated between $14 and $31 on the market since its debut. Shares were temporarily buoyed by news that Apple would include Yelp checkins in its iOS 6 maps application. Analysts, however, have maintained a “hold” recommendation for Yelp’s shares for most of its tenure as a public company.

In the first quarter of 2012, Yelp made $27.4 million in revenue but posted a net loss of $9.8 million.

Yelp shares closed down nearly 6 percent Wednesday but are trading up significantly in after-hours trading.

Photo credit: Yelp/Flickr

Bloomberg said this morning that documentation recently provided to Apple developers includes screenshots of Yelp check-ins within the new Apple Maps application, which will replace Google Maps as the default mapping solution within iOS sometime this fall.

Yelp has been a content partner for Apple’s Siri personal assistant since Siri’s launch, and Yelp’s positioning within the Siri service was solidified at the recent World Wide Developer’s Conference, where Apple revealed that Yelp star ratings and would appear within Siri results and that users could tap to go directly to a local business landing page on Yelp.

But this is a new level of integration.

Facebook’s new “Find Friends Nearby” feature uses your phone’s location-awareness functionality to broadcast your location to anyone nearby. Yelp checkins help users find friends as well but also enable discounts and preferential treatment at participating businesses. It’s not yet clear, however, if the new Apple Maps feature will allow iPhone owners to participate in those or if users will need a separate Yelp account in order to check in.

Checkins are also a major feature of Foursquare, although that location-based social network has recently been redesigned to simplify and de-emphasize the actual act of checking in.

Apple has not yet confirmed the news. VentureBeat has asked Apple PR to comment, and when we hear more, we’ll update this story.

Image credit: ShutterStock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hotshot investor Fritz Lanman has just launched a new iPhone app called Livestar that aims to upend reviews services like Yelp, Metacritic, and Rotten Tomatoes. It even takes shots at Foursquare.

Livestar’s app lets you see reviews for restaurants, movies, and music from “trusted sources” like newspapers and blogs that are near your location. You can also use your Facebook friends and people in your contact list to help get more recommendations. Eventually, the app will also include categories like TV shows, apps, books, apparel, and wine.

“We want to take the friction out of the reviews process,” Lanman said.

If you take a look at the photo above, you can see that the app includes features we’ve all come to expect from a social networking app. You can see your friends’ reviews and recommendations, a news feed for reading and responding to people’s banter about things being reviewed, and there’s a tab for sending out a note to friends, asking them for help when you want to crowdsource an answer.

Lanman says that Livestar will connect with consumers because it fills the reviews void better than any other alternative. He says Yelp is “controlled by a small hyper-local minority” and is filled with “paid reviews.” Foursquare has “high quality sources” (your friends) but the “signal is shitty and you have to rely on check-ins.” Metacritic, Lanman says, does not let you narrow down sources as well as Livestar, as the app lets you refine the search as deep as “comedy movie reviews by the New York Times.”

At this point, I’m not convinced people will use Livestar over Metacrtic or Rotten Tomatoes because those are well-established services that let you get a consensus of trusted sources and everyday users. But when it comes to restaurants (and in the future, mobile apps), Livestar has a strong proposition. People always need to eat, and there isn’t a popular Yelp-like app that aggregates professional restaurant reviews. The app is also constructed in such a way that you can give a place one to five stars by tapping on a rating, and you don’t have to write a review, so people might use it more than Yelp.

Lanman, a former senior director at Microsoft and an investor in Pinterest, Square, Chartbeat, and other notable startups, adds a high level of pedigree to the project. He’s been a deals guy and a savvy investor for a long while, so it’s interesting to see him at the helm of an iPhone app startup.

Seattle-based Livestar has about 10 employees and has raised $2 million in funding to date, with an impressive roster of investors, including SV Angel, Chernin Group, Morado Ventures, and Beehive Ventures, and individuals like Ray Ozzie, Matt Mullenweg, Don Mattrick, Max Ventilla, Hunter Walk, Mike Slade, and Charles Songhurst.

Check out Livestar’s slick video for more on the company’s vision:

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Design is determining the winners in everything mobile. The most successful players are focusing on one thing: How to make products, services, and devices as compelling and delightful as possible – visually, and experientially. MobileBeat 2012, July 10-11 in San Francisco , is assembling the most elite minds to debate how UI/UX is transforming every aspect of the mobile economy, and where the opportunities lie. Register here.

Travel recommendations company TripAdvisor is moving to restaurant review row and taking a seat next to Yelp and Foursquare with the release of Local Picks, a Facebook application for discovering dining recommendations from friends and locals.

Local Picks, launched Wednesday on Facebook, pulls from TripAdvisor’s vast collection of restaurant reviews, along with Foursquare tips, to provide users with suggestions on where to eat when at home or while traveling abroad.

“We heard from our users that restaurant opinions from locals and friends are extremely valuable,” TripAdvisor CEO Steve Kaufer told VentureBeat. “Local Picks makes these readily available on Facebook, which creates an insightful and fun (even addicting) user experience. TripAdvisor is constantly looking for innovative ways to help people harness the power of their social network for a more memorable travel experience.”

The app covers 850,000 restaurants, each with its own detailed restaurant profile embedded inside Facebook, and aims to surface eateries that locals love. Application users can turn to Local Picks and specify their taste preferences to receive top suggestions for a city. They can also rate restaurants on a one- to five-star scale, leave quick tips, write longer reviews, save places to lists, and “fave” or “want” locales.

The TripAdvisor Facebook application closely echoes the purpose of restaurant reviews site Yelp and even overlaps with Foursquare’s Explore functionality, but does so in a way that’s contained within Facebook and tightly integrated with Timeline. As a result, Local Picks could easily experience a network effect of activity from the social network’s 901 million active users and eventually offer up highly tailored recommendations from friends.

Where Local Picks seems to falter right now is in offering the perfect picks for different types of users, especially those with varying dietary restrictions or specific food and price point preferences. Top picks and recommended places hinge around locals’ and friends’ ratings, and do consider cuisine preferences, but come across as generic.

TripAdvisor, its own publicly traded company as of December 2011 (it was spun out of Expedia), made $48.1 million in net income from $183.7 million in revenue during the first quarter of 2011.

The company nets more than 50 million unique visitors each month and makes a majority of its revenue (79 percent) from click-based advertising.

Photo credit: Grant MacDonald/Flickr

Local business reviews are at your beck-and-call on Apple’s iPhone 4S, thanks to deeper ties between mobile virtual assistant Siri and Yelp’s reviews service.

Yelp, one of a group of third-party services to be integrated into the Siri experience at launch, was given a more dominant role on Apple’s best-selling device in the iOS 5.1 update released earlier this month, Yelp said Tuesday.

Now, if you query Siri for recommendations, say a great nail salon or vegan restaurant, it will return Yelp star-ratings next to local restaurants and businesses results that, on click, will open the application and direct you to a Yelp business page. Prior to the update, Siri would pull from Yelp to return local business results but not send you directly through to the application.

The Apple love could prove pretty consequential for Yelp if Siri users start clicking through to mobile business pages. More exposure and distribution from the powerful phone-maker will not only bring in more mobile users, and advertising dollars by association, but also help the newly IPO’d company win favor from Wall Street.

Yelp, which made its public debut on March 2, has already experienced a tumultuous stock market ride. The site was greeted with a warm, day-one welcome but quickly lost its luster and fell from a $26 a share high to a $19.36 low. The company has started to gain back ground and closed Tuesday at $22.90 a share with a $1.37 billion market cap.

Photo credit: Will Hastings/Flickr

Let the squealing begin. Oink, the also-ran mobile ratings application from Internet celebrity Kevin Rose’s startup Milk, is heading to the slaughter house after just four months of existence.

Oink is being shut down as Milk shifts focus to other projects, the startup announced Wednesday. The application’s corresponding website, Oink.com, will be shuttered by the end of the month and members are being encouraged to download their ratings and pictures should they wish to salvage something of their Oink experience.

The item-ranking and mini reviews application launched as a hybrid of Yelp, Instagram, and Foursquare and set out to help iPhone users discover what to do when they’re out and about. It was a hodgepodge of ideas all mashed into one application, and it did find some early favor with users. The application saw more than 150,000 downloads in its first month.

“Oink was our first test and, in preparing to move onto the next project, we’ve decided to shut it down to help focus our efforts,” Milk said in a statement posted to the Oink website.

The statement comes off as very nonchalant, and is similar to the way someone would shuck off a bad day — oh well, on to the next one. But in a past conversation with VentureBeat, Rose talked optimistically about Oink, even suggesting that it could prove popular enough to allow for a future business model. It also stands to reason that Milk, which invested five months of development into the Oink application prior to its release, never intended to spend more time developing the application than it did supporting its growth.

San Francisco-based Milk raised $1.5 million from Google Ventures shortly after the launch of Oink.

[via The Next Web]

Photo credit: Leo Reynolds/Flickr

Wall Street gave Yelp a less-than-perfect review on its second day of trading. The company’s stock slipped more than 14 percent Monday with shares closing at $20.99.

Yelp made a stellar, five-star debut on the New York Stock Exchange Friday. The business and local reviews site, which has around 66 million monthly unique visitors, saw shares skyrocket 63 percent from $15 to $24.52 on opening day. Today’s dip, however, suggests that the pomp-and-circumstance could be fading quickly.

“Yelp’s price action so far certainly reminds me of Groupon’s post IPO price action,” financial expert and PrivCo CEO Sam Hamadeh told VentureBeat. “We think Yelp’s stock price will continue to fall as (with Groupon) IPO investors who aren’t locked up sell and ‘hit bids’ from small retail investors, punishing the stock price.”

Yelp grew revenue 74 percent to $83.3 million in 2011, but lost $16.7 million during the same period. The company’s continued losses and minuscule revenue figures make it an especially risky bet, though investors were eager to at least temporarily jump on the bandwagon for Friday’s public debut.

“I wouldn’t want to have been the person who bought Groupon stock on the first day of trading at $31 [Groupon is now trading at $18]. And I certainly wouldn’t want to be the one who bought Yelp at $26 on Friday,” Hamadeh said, adding that both companies rely too heavily on sales employees for growth. “Both have ended and will end badly.”

Yelp’s stock has been up and down in after-hours trading Monday, recovering by as much as 8 percent. At $20.99 a share, Yelp has a market cap of $1.26 billion.

Photo credit: KayOne73/Flickr

The new menu feature, powered by SinglePlatform, provides members with a detailed look at more than 13 million menu items offered at restaurants, with caloric information and pricing available for some locations.

Menus can be found on the web and at the company’s mobile site – but not yet inside the mobile apps.

Foursquare, the startup that popularized the place check-in, is in the midst of a rebranding initiative to become better known as your one-stop-shop for location-based content. The startup has more than 15 million members who’ve checked in at venues a total of 1.5 billion times to date. Foursquare is using that data to make intelligent recommendations, via the Explore feature, on where people can go to eat, drink and be merry at any given time.

With the addition of menus, Foursquare has taken a far less scientific route to add even more practical, everyday purpose to the experience, especially for the passive person who’d prefer to consume information rather than share it. Menus might even keep people from navigating over to competitor Yelp for more venue details (Yelp listings don’t yet include full menus).

Of course, we’d love to have our cake and eat it too. That is, we’d like have menu items associated with related Foursquare tips and vice versa. Now that would be nifty.

[Image via bradleygee/Flickr]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

What’s for dessert? Turn to three month-old Ness for the answer, and its lovely-looking iPhone app will find you the best nearby spots, suited to your exact tastes. Today the application received its first update, and it now further personalizes and socializes the food discovery process.

“The launch of the product … was all about understanding what the person’s preferences are and making sure, as a company, that we provided high quality results and recommendations to people,” Ness co-founder Corey Reese told VentureBeat. “We’re now focusing on the social aspect, getting people to have a conversation with their friends about the places that they’re discovering.”

To bring you up to speed, Ness encourages users to rate and review restaurants. The iPhone app uses these bite-sized reviews, in addition to a user’s previous social activities (like checkins on Foursquare), to develop a “likeness score” and works to understand the types of foods and dishes a person enjoys. The app also considers recommendations from a user’s social network connections.

Ness uses all this data to make recommendations, with a strong level of confidence, about places serving various cuisine types — say pizza, coffee or dessert — that the user might like.

The new version of the application serves up a personalized home screen so that each user sees her favorite cuisines, as determine by Ness, when they fire up the application. But the bulk of the update is centered around getting users to share the Ness experience with their Facebook friends.

To that end, the application invites users to share their reviews on Facebook and encourages them to create thank you notes to acknowledge friends’ excellent recommendations (and these are automatically posted to recipients’ Facebook walls). Ness for iPhone also now features push notifications and an intelligent invitation screen designed to get users excited about inviting their friends to try the app.

“We found that it’s a really fantastic experience when there’s lots of content from a person’s social graph. We’re pretty good at predicting how much somebody will like a place, but we want to show why somebody’s going to like it,” Reese said. “With these features, our goal is to increase the amount of back and forth conversation that people have on their mobile devices about the places that they’re going out to.”

Ness Computing was founded in 2009 — at the time, Reese was an associate at venture capital firm Alsop Louis Partners — to build a better way for people to discover places and products by understanding the preferences of a person and her friends.

“We want to couple an amazing algorithmic understanding of who a person is and what they want, with the world’s slickest interface on the iOS platform — and eventually other platforms — to help people find places to go and products to buy,” Reese explained.

And while we won’t go so far as to say that Ness has the “world’s slickest interface,” we do have to give the company kudos for delivering a colorful and delightfully rich app experience. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that the startup has a secret weapon in Scott Goodson, an original member of Apple’s iOS team who now heads up mobile engineering at Ness.

Plus, for an iPhone application attempting to stand out in the increasingly competitive arena of food- and taste-related recommendations (Forkly and Alfred are new entrants, but Yelp and Foursquare are strong incumbents), Ness is doing rather well. The application has been downloaded and used by more than 100,000 folks, with users contributing 1.5 million ratings since the app launched on the App Store in August, Reese said.

The Ness team consists of 15 full-timers and several part-timers. The company is based in Silicon Valley and has raised more than $5 million in funding to date.

In a world where  information overload is driving us further apart, a startup called Loku has launched a technology to connect neighbors to their community and help people find cool things to do nearby.

Loku boils down huge feeds of data from sources such as local blogs and weekly newspapers, social media, restaurant reviews and deals, arranging them in a gorgeous webzine layout that’s automatically customized for your neighborhood. Currently Loku is rolling out in 15 cities.

Loku was created to solve a very real problem for founder Dan Street. He spent four or five nights per week traveling. Street, who worked in private equity and then as a consultant, says that he turned this road warrior lifestyle into a game and tried to experience life the way a local would. “I became obsessed with the idea of how do you become part of the community,” says Street.

Another issue, Street says, is that people within neighborhoods don’t really feel all that connected to each other, and often there isn’t a good way for them to stay on top of what’s going on around them. ”People don’t feel there’s a problem, because there’s nothing to solve it,” he says. In our mass media age, he says, we are unaware of just how disconnected we our from our neighbors and our neighborhoods.

With Loku, he hopes that people will be able to harness the torrent of social media data and the constant stream of information to have more meaningful local interactions.

Building Loku has taken three years and $350,000 of Street’s own money, with $1 million raised from angel investors, including Dave McClure’s 500 Startups.

“Where I’d like to have the biggest impact is certainly an automated version of Patch, with more tools for discovery,” said Street, referring to Aol’s network of community news sites that has been rolling out across the U.S. over the past two years. ”A little bit of Google, a little bit of Patch and a little bit of Yelp,” says Street of Loku.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social gives customers a single Web-based dashboard to manage and grow all their social networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Yelp, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. The tool monitors the web for social brand mentions and then alerts the user of potential customers. A contact center and promotional tool then allows users to engage those potential customers. Engagement features include being able to cross-post across all networks and schedule messages. An analysis tool allows users to track the progress of their outreach.

The company joins a whole host of social media management and monitoring tools, including Radian6, Visible Technology and Scout Labs, which was recently purchased by Lithium Technologies. Though Sprout Social appears to have a leg up on the competition as it pairs social monitoring with promotional tools to turn potential customers into actual customers.

The Chicago-based company, founded in 2009, previously raised an undisclosed amount from Lightbank, which also invested in Facebook application Where I’ve Been and Poggled, a social aggregation site.