Ever since the launch of his CityGrid local advertising network at the beginning of the year, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti has been putting most of his efforts into building out CityGrid as the largest network of local advertisers and local apps. Citysearch is now simply a flagship publisher on the CityGrid network. To reflect this shift in focus, the Citysearch business unit of IAC (which… → Read More
Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation is rumored to be in the $200 million range. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish an office in NYC (they are based in San Francisco). This is Yelp’s fourth round of funding since their… → Read More
We just got word from Judy’s Book founder and CEO Andy Sacks that the Seattle startup will be shutting down operations, and most of the staff of twelve was let go today. The company had raised a total of $10.5 million over two rounds of financing. Judy’s Book started off as a community driven review site for local businesses, but changed it’s focus in 2006 when the original model… → Read More
It seems like every time you turn around there’s another site out there trying to help you rate this, that, or the other thing. There’s Rapleaf (people), StreetAdvisor (neighborhood), YourStreet (neighborhood), SodaRatings (soda), and the list goes on (we wrote about Urbanspoon yesterday). Now there’s a new one in private beta, GarageSeek, for rating mechanic’s garages in… → Read More
Zipingo, the small business review site launched by Intuit in late 2005, shut down yesterday. When it launched, Zipingo competed with a slew of other startups that were targeting local business reviews. Of the three that we mentioned – Yelp, Judy’s Book and Insider Pages – only one, Yelp, remains in it’s original form. Judy’s Book changed its model to focus on coupons… → Read More
The Insider Pages acquisition rumors that we posted on last week were accurate – later today Citysearch, a division of InterActive Corp., will announce that they have acquired the company. The size of the transaction is not being disclosed, although our understanding from a source close to the deal is that the price is in the $13 million range. The company had previously raised approximately… → Read More
Update: See Troubled Insider Pages Acquired By CitySearch . Insider Pages, a user generated review site for local businesses, has been acquired by a public company, according to sources close to the deal. I also spoke with Insider Pages’ VP Marketing Anne Raimondi, who declined to comment. The company, originally founded by idealab, has faced heavy competition from Yelp and others. They… → Read More
Silicon Valley based Insider Pages, one of the many user review sites that have sprung up in the last couple of years, has reportedly laid off 2/3 of their total staff recently. The news is coming from companies that are interviewing former Insider Pages employees. The company, which is funded by Sequoia, Softbank and idealab, seems to be unable to keep up with the growth of competitor Yelp (and… → Read More
Zipingo joins the ranks of local business review and ranking services such as Yelp, Judy’s Book (which just raised $8 million from Mobius Venture Capital, Ignition Partners and Ackerley Partners) and idealab’s Insider Pages. Like the other sites, Zipingo aims to pair yellow page-like contact information for local businesses with user reviews. It was created (and owned) by Intuit. Since… → Read More
Company: Yelp Launched: in Beta (since late 2004) Location: San Francisco Yelp is a website that allows users to write and share reviews of local businesses. It also has social networking features (adding friends, groups, etc.) to share reviews with a trust network. The idea is that people generally trust their freinds’ recommendations. All of this user-generated content on local businesses… → Read More
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