Yelp has reached a settlement with employees who accuse the review site of breaking state and federal wage laws. Read More »
Tech
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 »
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 »
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 »
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, 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 »
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 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 »
Earlier this week Yelp said it was revising its daily deals strategy after encountering some “real challenges” in the space. According to new data from daily deals analysis firm Yipit, those challenges were indeed severe — and they may not be unique to just Yelp. Read More »
Yipit, a New York City-based deals aggregator and recommendation service, is growing fast and leveraging its wide knowledge of the tumultuous daily deals market. The company is not just rounding up deals, it’s also selling its data insights about this fast-growing market. Read More »
Foursquare and Yelp are moving into more direct competition, feature by feature. On Monday, Foursquare launched a new feature that allows users to create lists of the places they’ve checked into or plan to visit, bringing it further into the review and recommendation space. Read More »
Yelp has hired Rob Krolik to serve as its chief financial officer. Krolik’s resume includes time as the CFO of Shopping.com where he led the company through its IPO. Yelp CEO and co-founder Jeremy Stoppelman said Krolik’s public market savvy was key in his hiring. Read More »
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