Local business data provider Locu is announcing a partnership with Yelp today, in order to help update Yelp’s menus and other listings data with Locu’s real-time information directly from businesses. This will allow restaurants on Locu to distribute their menus and daily specials to Yelp, but it will also help Locu further expand into other verticals beyond restaurants alone. The… → Read More
Yelp is announcing a new feature intended to highlight and quantify the value that the listing and review site provides for small businesses.
A company spokesperson told me the feature is important for two reasons. First, it helps business owners understand the impact that Yelp is already having on their revenue. Second, it gives them a baseline from which to judge the success of their… → Read More
Today, Yelp announced its fourth-quarter earnings, and they weren’t as sunny as some as hoped. Net revenue was $41.2 million in Q4 of 2012 — a 65 percent growth in new revenue from 2011. In turn, net loss was $5.3 million, or $0.08 per share, compared to a net loss of $9.1 million, or $0.55 in the fourth quarter of 2011. Adjusted EBITDA was $1.8 million. → Read More
Yelp is adding restaurant inspection scores to reviews on its business pages, initially for the cities of San Francisco and New York, but with a plan to roll the feature out to other cities where other local authorities are open to working with it. Yelp said it has worked with local authorities’ technology departments in San Francisco and New York to import hygiene scores into listings. → Read More
When his grandmother was no longer able to live safely at home, Tal Ziv and his relatives set out to help her find the best senior care facility — better known as assisted living communities. It’s an experience many families face at some point, and it’s not always an easy one. What’s more, the stakes are high; we want loved ones to be at home in a great environment, but there’s also the fact that… → Read More
Back in July, collaborative code repository GitHub raised a whopping $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz to build out an enterprise version of the service, among other things. Up until now, it’s been in need of someone to help the co-founders manage that cash and keep the fiscal ship from any nearby cliffs. Today, via blog post, GitHub CEO and co-founder Tom Preston-Werner announced that the… → Read More
When Foursquare introduced the new web version of its “Explore” functionality for those who visit its homepage, we knew that something was up. This was absolutely the “new” Foursquare built on top of all the data that we’ve provided the service for years and years. You see, check-ins, tips and social connections tell many stories. → Read More
Yelp is announcing a new feature today that allows users to browse restaurant menus (with accompanying food porn) directly from the Yelp website and mobile app.
Last year, the company added the ability for businesses to include menu links in their Yelp profiles, but until now there hasn’t been any menu functionality on Yelp itself. A spokesperson sent me an early copy of the company blog post… → Read More
This just in: online recommendations and listings site Yelp is stepping up its international push and buying its biggest rival in Europe, Qype. It will pay €18.6 million for all of Qype’s shares and is adding another 970,000 shares of Yelp’s Class A common stock, for a total purchase price of approximately $50 million. Qype is headquartered in Germany, with operations across Europe. Combined… → Read More
As I’ve said before, I’m an avid user of foursquare, and it has become the de facto service for me when it comes to finding new places to grab dinner or just chill out with a drink. I’ve been using the service since it launched in 2009, and I’ve found it to be a fun way to chronicle the vast world that I live in. One day, I will be able to show my kids the history of check-ins and information that… → Read More
Local reviews site Yelp — which is up against big competition in Europe in competitor Qype — has launched Yelp Poland, giving it a stronger base in Central Europe.
The U.S.-based publicly listed company already has a Central European presence in Germany (launched in July 2010), Austria (launched in October 2012), and Switzerland (launched in September 2011) — though Qype itself is also… → Read More
While this isn’t a major feature update by any means, foursquare is definitely pushing its Explore functionality forward by making it more prominent in its mobile apps, site and now by letting you add a shortcut directly to the tab on your Android device.
In a quick post today, the company talked about the thoughts behind the move. → Read More
Earlier this year, young venture capital fund and startup accelerator 500 Startups announced some changes that indicated its intent to move beyond adolescence into adulthood, and expand its scope beyond the U.S. The firm raised a new, bigger fund, added new partners, and increase its focus on identifying and investing in talented international entrepreneurs.
Dave McClure and company have… → Read More
While the name may be a bit unruly, TalkFavorites.me is a rating system for the best stuff near you. There are no reviews to AstroTurf, no business details to mess up, and no horribly-written screeds against unfairly-judged businesses. Instead, you vote for the best stuff in your area and then consult those lists as you look for, say, the best pizza in West Chester, Penn.
We spoke with… → Read More
Tourists rave about a city’s well-known restaurants and distort their review averages. So today travel site TripAdvisor starts highlighting beloved eateries from people who live nearby in Local Picks, a Facebook app it’s relaunching. Originally released in 2007 but shut down from 2010 until now, Local Picks pulls in reviews of 850,000 restaurants from TripAdvisor, re-sorts them to more heavily… → Read More
Microsoft’s Bing is on a roll…in terms of new partnership announcements, that is. Today, Bing and Yelp are announcing a co-branded relationship that will bring Yelp’s local business content to Bing’s Local search pages. The pages will display “Powered by Yelp,” beginning today with full U.S. availability expected over the next few weeks.
Yelp will bring its reviews, photos, business… → Read More
Peter Fenton joined Benchmark Capital in 2006, after spending seven years as a partner at Accel. Not yet 40, Fenton already sits on the board of directors at companies like New Relic, Polyvore, Twitter, Yelp, and Zendesk. Starting at Accel in his late twenties, the young investor focused his attention on the enterprise — on backing smart software and infrastructure companies. In 2009, for… → Read More
Just as we get news of some consolidation in the local content market in the UK, some news of expansion, too: Qype, the Yelp of Europe (and Yelp’s closest competitor in the region), today announced that the number of places reviewed on its site has reached 860,000, with the number of monthly unique visitors now at 25 million. It claims that this makes it the biggest reviews site in the region… → Read More
In its first ever earnings report as a publicly-traded company, Yelp said it earned $27.4 million in revenue, up 66 percent from the $16.5 million it made in the same time a year ago.
However, the company more than tripled its net losses, mostly on rising costs associated with supporting a larger sales staff. It lost $9.8 million, up from the $2.7 million it lost in the same time a year… → Read More
Finding a good restaurant – even in a city you’ve never been to – has never been easier. Thanks to Yelp, Urbanspoon and its various brethren, a good place to eat is generally just a few clicks away. What if you want to find a restaurant with a very specific atmosphere, though? Say you’re in the mood for a pizza at a relaxed place where the noise level is just right for a good conversation? Chances… → Read More
Remember Highlight? That app that everyone thought was hot stuff back at SXSW? I used it for a few days and then deleted it, discovering quite quickly that the app, despite some utility, was an absolute battery hog. But what Highlight did was prove that, given the proper scenario, check-in works and is important. What frustrates me most, however, is that we keep doing it wrong.
Take this new … → Read More
At TechCrunch Disrupt NYC last year, Gauri Manglik, Mike Lewis, and Orion Burt launched SpotOn, a recommendation engine in app, which served its users suggested local businesses based on their friends’ activity on Foursquare, Facebook, and more. The co-founders quickly found, however, that its customers were using the app more as a social networking tool than for its recommendations. So, based on… → Read More
With Yelp stock beginning its second day of trading tomorrow morning, I wondered what a Yelp review of Yelp stock might it look like. → Read More
For Yelp, this has been a very good day. The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. → Read More
Wow. Reviews site Yelp just saw a huge pop in early trading of its stock on the New York Stock Exchange this morning. Yelp opened at $22 per share, after pricing at $15 last night. Shares, which are listed under the symbol ‘YELP’, are trading up 60 percent from last night’s pricing, putting Yelp’s valuation at over $1.3 billion. UPDATE: Yelp’s stock closed at $24.52, up over 60 percent from the… → Read More
Tomorrow morning comes the moment Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman’s been waiting for seven years. According to the NYT, Yelp will drop on the NYSE under the YELP ticker tomorrow morning.
Yelp will be offering 7.15 million shares at $15 dollars a share, wanting to raise about $107.25 million in its IPO. The deal is said to be heavily over subscribed, and I’ve heard that some Yelpers were… → Read More
Yelp built its ad business by attracting users that know what they want, just not who to buy it from — exactly when ads are most effective. That’s why I find today’s VentureBeat piece by Rocky Agrawal titled “Yelp advertising is a rip-off for small advertisers” to be ridiculous. His sources say Yelp charges a $600 CPM, or 1,000-times the standard online CPM rate.
Yes, these ads are expensive… → Read More
I’ve heard like a billion people complain about this recently so here goes: When you’re starving you don’t want to read through thousands of Yelp reviews on your phone or download a random PDF from a terrible restaurant website that’s so slow-loading it’s indecipherable. You just want to know where a restaurant is, what it has to eat, and whether or not it’s open.
Local recommendation site Yelp has finally filed an S-1 to IPO, wanting to raise $100 million.
The site generated $58.4 million revenue in the first nine months of 2011, 80% growth over the same period in 2010. They operated at a net loss however, of $7.6 million. → Read More
Yelp and Groupon are both being sued by a company called Mobile Commerce Framework, an obscure patent troll that earlier filed a similar patent infringement suit against Foursquare.
On April 6, 2010, Mobile Commerce Framework (MCF) was issued US Patent No. 7,693,752 by the USPTO, for reasons unknown to mankind. In summary, this patent describes:
(After the jump) → Read More
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