It has been over three months since we first broke the news on the existence of Disco, the group messaging app made by the Slide team within Google. Google still refuses to talk about it. But work continues nonetheless. Today brings version 3 of the app — and the app is starting to get really good.
Just a little over a month after Disco was updated to version 2.0 with Push Notifications, today’s update brings a range of key new features. The biggest one is photo sharing, a feature which is now a must-have for all group messaging apps. Also new is 1-to-1 chat capabilities. But the most important additions may be the things Slide/Google is trying to do to help differentiate Disco from the rest of the pack. Namely, they’ve baked in Twitter and Yelp integration. → Read More
Bubble or not, 2011 may go down as the year of the tech IPO. Not since the last bubble have we seen so many technology companies clamoring to go public. And halfway through the year, we still have many more companies who will be listing on either the NASDAQ or the NYSE in the next six months. Here’s a roundup of the tech companies that have gone public, where they are trading now, and who we can expect to see ringing the bell next.
Professional social network LinkedIn probably had the biggest IPO in terms of hype this year because it was one of the first big social media companies to go public. After pricing its IPO at $45 per share on the New York Stock Exchange, LinkedIn began trading at $83.00 per share on May 19, giving the company a $7.8 billion market cap. In the first day of trading, shares popped up to as high as $122.70, soaring past a $10 billion valuation. → Read More
The next phase of growth for local deals will be mobile. Groupon knows this, and so does Yelp, which today is rolling out Yelp Deals to its iPhone and Android apps. An update to its mobile apps that is getting pushed out today will add a new deals icon to the app. When you click on it you can see a list of nearby Yelp Deals for discounts at restaurants, spas, and other businesses. (These are in addition to Yelp Special Offers and Check-In Offers, which already appear on mobile).
With Yelp Deals on mobile, you can search for nearby deals when you are walking around, and they are instantly redeemable. You get a redemption code that you can show the merchant right from your mobile phone. This is similar to what Groupon is trying to do with its Groupon Now mobile app, which is only available in a handful of cities (fewer than Yelp Mobile has out of the gate). → Read More
Google Places is at it again, brazenly borrowing reviews from Yelp. But this time it’s in their iPhone app and they are not even bothering to link back to Yelp or attribute where they are getting the reviews. Yelp and Google have a love-hate relationship. Yelp loves when its listings and reviews show up in natural search results, but they hate it when Google scrapes their reviews to populate its own local listings in Google Places.
This tension between the two has been playing out for a long time with various ups and downs. It’s become a running joke. But Google appears to be pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable once again with its mobile app. → Read More
Yelp’s international sites have been growing like crazy, with non-U.S. traffic doubling in the past year. Today, it is adding a fifth non-English international site, Spain, to its roster. (The other international Yelp sites are in France, Germany, Austria, and the Netherlands).
Yelp is now at 50 million unique visitors per month, mostly in the U.S., according to its internal stats. ComScore shows 87 percent growth in non-U.S. unique visitors over the past year (Yelp’s internal stats show more than 100 percent growth). → Read More
San Francisco City Supervisors are meeting today to vote on whether companies like Twitter moving into the city’s blighted Tenderloin neighborhood will get a generous enough tax break to keep them from leaving the city. It’s an important vote for all of Twitter’s employees, as it will probably dictate whether they start commuting to Brisbane or not. And it’s an important vote for Zynga, Yelp and other large startups who are having similar conversations with the city.
But the vote is also an important first step for any entrepreneur thinking of opening a high-growth company in San Francisco– ever. → Read More
Over the last couple years, there’s been a huge surge in the suite of online services referred to collectively as ‘local’. There’s Facebook Places, which prompts users to check-in and claim deals. There’s Google Places, which recently launched its own check-in feature and also aggregates reviews from a variety of online service. And of course there’s Foursquare, which popularized the check-in model in the first place and recently launched a new Explore feature.
But despite all of this new competition, Yelp — which has been focused on local since 2004 — is still growing at a clip pace. Today the company has surpassed 50 million monthly unique users (as reported by their internal Google Analytics), up from 46 million the month before. And they have a total of 17 million reviews for venues around the world. CEO Jeremy Stoppelman says that the service is seeing a faster rate of growth for both contributions (reviews) and users than it has historically— in Q1, users wrote 2 million reviews, while most quarters average 1 million. In other words, even if some of these other services are gaining traction, it isn’t hurting Yelp. → Read More
In Silicon Valley it’s not just who you invest in that matters– it’s also when you invest in them. The earlier the investment, the riskier the bet. But the more jawdropping the returns if the company hits it big. It’s so lopsided, that typically just 5% of those unsure early bets create some 95% of the entire venture industry’s returns. Miss one of them, and it haunts you for years. Snag it, and you can brag for even longer. This simple reality is precisely what makes the venture business hard, and the justification for why partners make such huge fees.
So what’s up with the surge of the strongest early stage firms jumping so heavily into late stage mega-deal fray? Have the Valley’s superstars lost sight of these rules or are the rules changing?
Earlier this year, we wrote a lot about the shift in power at the early stages with the rise of super angels, but you could argue there are far greater ripple effects to this new late stage frenzy. That’s not only true for the Valley, it’s true for the stock market. And you could argue, those ripple effects are less well-understood. → Read More
Restaurant review company Zagat is best known for its print surveys that review and rank the best restaurants, bars and more in a particular city or region. But with the success of user-generated review site Yelp, Zagat has steadily been upgrading its online offerings, striking partnerships with Foursquare and Foodspotting and releasing mobile apps. For the most part, the company’s content has been behind a paywall, with in-depth reviews and features available exclusively to paying members. But today, Zagat is adding more free content to the site, including lists, third-party reviews and more.
Zagat is now allowing users to surface reviews in an easier way with enhanced search capabilities. New interactive maps allow diners to search by clicking on any neighborhood, drawing an area on a map, or indicating a popular landmark. Zagat has also compiled hundreds of lists of restaurants based on editor picks, and other topics, which users can access for free. → Read More
Last week we debuted a new show on TechCrunch TV that took us on a whirlwind tour of Scribd, the popular document sharing website. Feedback to that episode of was extremely positive, so we’re not wasting any time in bringing you another awesome tour of a hot tech company. This week’s blinged-out pad: Yelp.
We’re still taking suggestions for more companies to check out, so feel free to leave your requests in the comments (be sure to tell us why it’s a great office!). And yes, we’re definitely interested in scoping out startups that don’t necessarily have millions in funding — provided your office has some character. We’ve also gotten a bunch of requests to check out offices in other parts of the country (I hear you, NYC), so we’ll do our best to get out there too. → Read More
Yesterday brought bad news for Elevation with a report that superstar partner Marc Bodnick was leaving the firm. The story seems to have gotten a lot more interesting today. We’re hearing reports that Bodnick isn’t simply heading for a new sexier venture firm– he’s heading to Quora to become the company’s CFO. This certainly adds some credence to those who believe Quora is more than just the next generation of Yahoo Answers. It’s no secret that Bodnick has been deeply impressed by the company and spending a good deal of time on the site.
As this story has unfolded this morning, there’s been some debate over exactly what title Bodnick will have, and we’ve continued to update this story based on what sources close to the players are telling us. His background is in finance, so he’ll no doubt help out with CFO-duties, but it’s not clear why Quora needs such a polished full-time CFO at this point in its development. He will likely wind up serving as the requisite “grown up” more than anything else, helping Quora scale, build a real business and giving the company a polished spokesperson. It’s a role Bodnick would be familiar with– after all his sister-in-law is Sheryl Sandberg, Mark Zuckerberg’s no. 2 at Facebook. → Read More
Google Places is now on your iPhone. If you download the app (iTunes link) you get a mobile version of Google Places, Google’s local directory. It shows you nearby restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATMs, gas stations, hotels, and other attractions. You can also search for any category you like, just like on Google Places proper or on Google Maps for Android.
Perhaps the most important feature for Google is getting people to write more native reviews using the app. The app shows excerpts of reviews from around the web like on Yelp or Insiderpages, and below that are the native Google reviews. Currently, Google Places does not have a lot of great quality reviews written by Google users themselves. Therefore, Google built the product on the backs of reviews from other sites on the Web. But Google wants to build up its own corpus of reviews, and with apps like this it is going straight to consumers to get them to rate and review places around where they live, work, and travel. → Read More
Earlier this year, Bloomberg BusinessWeek reported that Microsoft, not just Google, made a serious attempt to acquire business directory and reviews site Yelp. According to “two people involved in the negotiations”, the Redmond software giant even bid as high as $700 million for the company. Yelp instead opted to remain independent, for better or worse.
Google is attacking it with Places and Hotpot.
And now some information has surfaced that indicates Microsoft could be planning a Yelp rival as well. → Read More
Yelp, which has one of the most popular apps on the iPhone, today is finally available on the iPad (iTunes link). The iPad version is built for browsing, with a double-pane experience—lists and search results on the left, profiles, maps, and photos on the right. As you scroll down each listing, the larger window on the right fills with a more detailed drill-down. But what is really different about the iPad version is how it handles photos.
For every local search, you can view results as a list, on a map, or as a grid of photos. The photo view is especially helpful for restaurant searches, allowing you to pick a place to eat based on how good the food looks. Even in list-mode, when you click on a photo in a profile, it expands to take up the whole righthand window. Photos are uploaded by both Yelp users and the businesses themselves. → Read More
Lots of people argue about which place has the best pizza. But only a geek’s geek would get so obsessed that they spend a whole weekend determining as scientifically as possible exactly who’s right and who’s wrong.
Enter David Shamma, a research scientist and Chicago style pizza snob. He argued with former Yahoo product guru Daniel Raffel about which Chicago joint had the best pizza.
They failed to find common ground. So (of course) they asked a scientist and cognitive psychologist specializing in human-computer interaction to create and conduct an experiment to settle things. → Read More
Over the weekend, the Wall Street Journal ran an article pointing out how Google is increasingly favoring its own properties, in search results over natural results to outside sites which previously commanded the top spots. This practice is especially noticeable with Google Places and local results, but there are other examples as well from product and mortgage search to health search. We’ve seen these spats before, particularly between Google and Yelp. Citysearch and Tripadvisor are also taking a traffic hit, it seems. Google responded yesterday with a post on its public policy blog titled “Local Search: It’s all about the best answers for users.”
Yeah, right. Don’t kid yourself. It’s all about what is best for Google. How else do you explain the preponderance of Google Places listings in local search results for queries such as “NY Chiropractor” (see screenshot) or “NYC spa”? In each case the top 7 links after the paid ads are businesses which just happen to have a Google Places page. → Read More
Local reviews site Qype, which lets you review any venue from restaurants and bars to gyms and childcare, has raised a new funding round amounting to a combined 6.5 million euros to throw fuel onto its mobile business. Investors include Vodafone Ventures and existing backers. Currently the largest user-generated local review site in Europe (yes, it’s ahead of Yelp), Qype has raised 3.5 million euros from Vodafone Ventures and a further 3.0 million euros from its existing three investors, Advent Venture Partners, Partech International and Wellington Partners.
The main aspect of this deal means co-branded version of Qype’s application will be pre-loaded on supported Vodafone devices, including Blackberry and Android on handsets in the UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Netherlands and Ireland. It’s likely that Qype will do best out of pre-installation on Android devices. → Read More
I’ve had a checkered relationship with OpenTable. Initially, I loved it as a user, then was let down as the service evolved. For instance I found the eat-at-100-restaurants-and-get-a-measly-$20-check rewards system slightly better than a punch in the face and was annoyed that restaurants still required me to call to verify a reservation. If I had time to make a phone call, I wouldn’t have used OpenTable. Duh.
I’ve vocally accused the site of tailoring its service too much to the restaurants’ needs– who after all pay the bills– and ignoring a better customer experience. (Once a customer service rep for OpenTable actually told me they only cared if the restaurants were happy.) Then, the company addressed a lot of my issues, for instance offering easy ways to get larger numbers of dining points, and the CEO Jeff Jordan and I sat down and hashed it out in a video interview and I came away more impressed with him and the company’s management generally.
Lately, a diner like me isn’t the one doing the bitching–it’s restaurants. Something strange has been happening in San Francisco, which is OpenTable’s home market and oldest market. → Read More
Yelp got into the location battle earlier this year when the local business listings and review site started allowing users to check-in to restaurants, bars and businesses. Foursquare as long been offering deals as an incentive to check-ins, allowing users to unlock discounts and coupons when they check-in to a venue. It looks like Yelp is following in the footsteps of Foursquare once again with the launch of Check-In Offers.
While details are limited, Check-In offers seem fairly simple. If you check-in to a venue, a merchant can offer you a special discount or coupon for checking in. Yelp also says that this is different from the Sales and Special Offers feature, which allows merchants to announce discounts on their Yelp listings. While we don’t know exactly how the offers will work, Yelp could possibly integrate its Groupon-like daily deals as well. → Read More
San Francisco, CA
