Foursquare tweaks desktop version of site as it moves toward local search
Foursquare has modernized and updated the Foursquare.com listings for businesses as the company moves to challenge Yelp and improve growth. Read more »
Big, open data: MapR on Github and Yelp’s dataset challenge
MapR is releasing open source code and partnering with Canonical on Ubuntu, while Netflix is releasing some data for for developers to play with. Sounds like a good day for openness. Read more »
Yahoo acquires social recommendation startup Jybe
Yahoo has acquired Jybe, the personalized recommendation app that aimed to help consumers get recomendations from friends around them, and then also move toward making purchases through the app. The acquisition shows part of Yahoo’s latest social strategy. Read more »
From pedicures to pet grooming, MyTime wants to be your online booking solution
Could one startup convince local businesses to get on board with online booking? A Silicon Valley entrepreneur is going to see if local businesses want to get on board with his new company called MyTime. Read more »
Google wins: a plain English guide to the FTC’s big ruling
photo: Kzenon via Shutterstock
After a two-year investigation into Google’s search business, the feds finally issued a decision. The outcome is a clear win for Google — here’s an easy Q&A about what happened and what it means. Read more »
Path dives into search with a thematic approach to digging
Path is adding its own version of search to your Path moments and check-ins on Thursday, implementing a search bar that lets you look through your posts for memories with a particular friend or restaurants that are popular nearby. Read more »
Facebook muscles in on Yelp and Foursquare with Nearby upgrades
photo: Facebook
Facebook is leaping into the local discovery and search market with an upgrade to its mobile Nearby feature, which will allow users to find relevant places based on social signals and other data. Nearby will pit Facebook against Yelp, Foursquare and Google. Read more »
Yahoo gets hip to entrepreneurs and puts Max Levchin on its board
Yahoo has added Max Levchin, a Silicon Valley star, to its board of directors giving it a much-needed entrepreneurial and engineering-savvy board member. The web portal will also see two of its existing directors leave, shrinking the board to 11 members. Read more »
Startup ZenPayroll nets big seed funding to take on ADP
Company says payroll for small and medium companies is an area ripe for innovation. Current leaders ADP and Paychex are too pricey and many companies have yet to automate the process at all, says ZenPayroll CEO Joshua Reeves. Read more »
Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp tell how to save big bucks in the cloud
photo: Derrick Harris
At the AWS Re: Invent conference, engineers from Pinterest, Flipboard and Yelp detailed some of the strategies their companies employ in order to keep costs low as computing demand increases. The keys are keeping an eagle eye on usage and using the right types of resources. Read more »
Foursquare takes on Yelp with 10-point rating system
photo: Foursquare
Foursquare has said it’s gunning for Yelp and Google and now it has a 10-point rating system that shows how it will compete head-on in the local search and recommendation space. Read more »
Yelp’s flaws become Apple Maps flaws in iOS 6
There’s been plenty of anecdotal evidence already offered that Maps needs work — at times location data is missing or directions were wrong. But on more than one occasion Maps have led users astray because of the user-sourced business information that Apple is using from Yelp. Read more »
Village Voice sues Yelp for using “Best of”
The publisher of one-time counter-culture icon The Village Voice is expanding its legal campaign to own the phrase “best of.” Popular user review site Yelp is its latest target. Read more at paidContent »
Foursquare’s Crowley wants to take on Yelp, Google and Harry Potter
Dennis Crowely of Foursquare has a big goal of creating an ambient-aware location service that will recommend people, places and events happening nearby, but the hardware isn’t quite up to snuff yet. In the meantime, he’s using location data to take on Yelp and Google. Read more »
Gartner predicts raft of fake online reviews by 2014
photo: Shutterstock / Africa Studio
If you think fake online reviews are bad now, just wait a few years. Gartner predicts that in two to three years, 10 to 15 percent of all online reviews will be bought and paid for by businesses. Read more »
How much better is GPS over Wi-Fi positioning? Yelp knows
Global positioning systems provide better location accuracy over solutions that use Wi-Fi networks, but just how much better is GPS? Yelp sifted through its check-in data to see and not only found out the accuracy variance, but also an interesting location tidbit on iPhones vs Androids. Read more »
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Consumer privacy in the mobile advertising era
Smartphones can enable an amazing level of connectivity, but they can also allow that activity to be monitored and used in controversial ways. But for mobile marketing to realize its full potential, consumers may need to sacrifice their privacy to one degree or another. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Super troll sues Netflix, Yelp, dozens more over Autocomplete
photo: Flickr / Jacob Bøtter
This one’s a doozy even by patent troll standards. A shell company that is already suing Apple and Nokia over a common autocomplete feature is now branching out to file dozens of patent claims against online video firms and retailers. Read more »
What the heck is iCloud again? Plus 4 other Apple stories to read today
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: confusion over iCloud, how EPEAT ratings actually work, Steve Jobs feared Google acquiring Yelp, how the iPhone and Samsung are dominating mobile industry value, and Mountain Lion’s pending release. Read more »
Google vs everyone: an epic war on many fronts
Google celebrated day one of Google I/O 2012 conference with a slew of new products and more announcements. Stand back a little and you start to see a company has pitch battles on its hand on many fronts, despite being strong on search, advertising and android. Read more »
What iPhone with NFC & Passbook means for airlines, plus 4 other Apple stories to read today
Here’s our daily pick of stories about Apple from around the web that you shouldn’t miss. Today’s installment: The airline industry is anticipating an NFC iPhone, Yelp gets further integration with iOS devices, App Store’s changing search and the influence of Steve Jobs on Disney stores. Read more »
Zagat goes free with launch of Google+ Local
Since Google bought Zagat last September for a reported $125 million, the company hasn’t done much with Zagat’s local content. That changes today with the rollout of Google+ Local, which incorporates Zagat scores and summaries into its listings — and makes Zagat free. Read more at paidContent »
Yelp gives $1.2 million to settle unpaid overtime suit
Yelp has reached a settlement with employees who accuse the review site of breaking state and federal wage laws. Read more »
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2012: The Hadoop infrastructure market booms
There are now more than half a dozen commercial Hadoop distributions in the market, and almost every enterprise with big data challenges is tinkering with the Apache Foundation-licensed software. A new report examines the key disruptive trends shaping the Hadoop platform market. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
As unstructured data heats up, will you need a license to webcrawl?
Cheap computing and the ability to store a lot of data fairly cheaply have made the concept of big data a buig business. But amid the frenzy to gather such information, especially unstructured information, are companies pushing the boundaries of polite (or ethical) behavior? Read more »
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Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem
The recruiting ecosystem is changing, led by professional social networks like LinkedIn and Viadeo and companies like Jobvite and BranchOut, which are building Facebook apps for hiring and career development. The bottom line is that technology enables the recruiting process to be more streamlined, scientific and democratic. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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A near-term outlook for big data
Big data now touches everything from enterprises to smart-meter startups, while Hadoop is fast becoming the leading tool to analyze that data, and debates around privacy abound. GigaOM Pro analysts offer insights on what to consider when it comes to big data decisions for your business. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Should Apple Pay For The Bad Deeds Of Its App Makers?
A sprawling lawsuit filed in Texas this week targets Path, Instagram, Facebook and others for instructing their apps to suck up user address… Read more at paidContent »
What do Yelp and Twitter have in common?
Today, Yelp had a spectacular initial public offering and is worth almost a billion dollars. There is more talk of a Twitter IPO and that too would be spectacular. But one thing in common between these two companies – a propensity for airbrushing the past. Read more »
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Opportunities and challenges for mobile deals
Mobile deals combine location-aware discounts with mobile marketing campaigns. What are the largest pitfalls in this promising space, though? Privacy and security issues must be addressed to assure consumers their purchases are secure and their location is being closely guarded. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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NewNet Q4: Platform mania and social commerce shakeout
The fourth quarter may have lacked a dominating big-event product announcement like Q3’s Facebook platform extension or Q2’s unveiling of Google+, but the NewNet world continued to buzz along. In the battle for mind share, everyone wanted to be a platform. Meanwhile, consumer and social technologies continued to gain momentum, and new vehicles for content and service discovery presented both challenges and opportunities for NewNet companies. And it is hard to ignore the overcrowded but growing world of daily deals. This quarterly report analyzes these trends and others, and it also provides a near-term outlook of trends, technologies and companies to watch in 2012. Companies mentioned in the report include Amazon, Facebook and Socialcast. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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Migrating media applications to the private cloud: best practices for businesses
If your company has a cloud application with a predictable audience size or one that is costing you more than $25,000 a month to host, you may want to consider maintaining a private cloud. This paper provides an overview of the factors that decision makers who are developing a public-to-private cloud-migration strategy should consider, recognizing that public versus private cloud strategy is not an all-or-nothing proposition. It also details pitfalls that must be avoided along the way and provides a case study of Zynga, a company that has found a way to use both the private and public clouds to create a hybrid solution. Companies mentioned in this report include Akamai, Foursquare, Nimbula and ARM. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Fondu builds a mobile social network for bite-sized places reviews
Fondu, a New York start-up, is launching its mobile app on iOS today, introducing a purpose-built mobile social network designed specifically for discovering places through friends. It mixes some of Yelp’s structure with Foursquare’s tips and Twitter’s short messages. Read more »
Can a new wave of apps kill the 5-star rating system?
A new wave of apps aims to replace the increasingly crowded space of long-winded five-star user generated reviews (like those on Yelp and Amazon) with straightforward social recommendations. The newest entrant in this field, an iPhone app called Stamped, aims to win with simplicity. Read more »
Yelp top brass cashed out $36M in pre-IPO stock sale
Six of Yelp’s top executives and investors cashed out $36.8 million worth of company stock during Yelp’s Series E funding round in early 2010, according to the company’s IPO filing, with CEO Jeremy Stoppelman and board chairman Max Levchin each selling some $15 million of stock. Read more »
Yelp files for $100M initial public offering
Yelp, the San Francisco-based local reviews website, has filed official documents to raise up to $100 million in an IPO of its stock. The filing reveals that Yelp pulls in solid top line sales, but has yet to turn a profit at the bottom line. Read more »
Chicago Doctors Sue Google Over Negative Online Reviews
An Illinois woman complained on the internet that her plastic surgery resulted in “facial lumps.” Now, two doctors who didn’t like her revie… Read more at paidContent »
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The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
As our demand for data increases, so too do the number of mobile devices and services. Add to that the infrastructure needed to support such connectivity, and a wide, complex picture of the mobile industry emerges. This report examines the various sectors of the mobile landscape and what the future holds for each. Hardware, cloud services, mobile search, advertising, location-based services and the growing ubiquity of the Internet of Things will all play an important role in the concept of mobility as it shifts and evolves over the next several years. With the help of more than a dozen contributors, GigaOM Pro presents a comprehensive analysis of the companies and trends that will lead us into the next era of mobile. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Congress doesn’t get Google, and it doesn’t get Congress
Is Google evil? Members of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition Policy and Consumer Rights tried to decide that today in a hearing on Google’s market power. The end result was the Senators requested Google make voluntary changes to its search ranking. Read more »
Google buys Zagat to add people power to its algorithms
Google has bought restaurant ratings publisher Zagat, in a deal whose value hasn’t been disclosed. The deal helps Google bring in a source of recommendations and user generated content that meshes well with its engineering-centric culture and could boost Zagat’s profile among the digerati. Read more »
