Ever since it emerged from Chicago’s small startup community in 2008, Groupon has had nothing short of a spectacular story in terms of its growth: With estimated annual revenues of more than $4 billion after just three years of existence, the poster child for the “group ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
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 »
The rapid growth of me-too daily deal services was bound to see a turn at some point, and it looks like that moment has come. Today, it emer… Read more at paidContent »
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 »
Thanks to the rating systems in place on such popular websites as Yelp, Amazon and eBay, many people are comfortable evaluating things in absolute terms: a two-star restaurant, a B movie and so on. But new MIT research says this approach is fundamentally flawed. Read more »
WhitePages’ new local discovery app is launching on Android first, in part because the platform allows it the ability to better track the efficacy of location-based ads. It’s another sign that Android is appealing to more developers. Read more »
The second quarter of 2011 in mobile was all about smartphones, thanks to Google’s Android, Apple’s iOS and mobile data consumption ramping up. In the tablet space, the iPad lacked any real competition, though that dominance will surely fade as more and more alternatives — from Cisco, HP and others — emerge. Elsewhere, location-based marketing finally made some headlines, and the groundwork for near-field communications looks to be finally falling into place. Additional companies in this report include Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft and Research In Motion. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
If you think downloading yet another mobile app featuring photo-sharing, geo-location, and social networking is crazy, prepare yourself for a moment of insanity. MeetTrover, a nifty new iPhone app launched in May that perfectly fills the gaps left by Instagram, Foursquare and Yelp. Read more »
Hadoop has been used by large web companies for applications such as search engines, but the reality is that the project is so much more. This report takes a closer look, examining what Hadoop is (and isn’t), who’s doing what to productize it and why we can expect to see the market pick up serious steam in 2011. We profile the growing number of companies — from startups like MapR to Cloudera, the arguable leader in the space — using Hadoop, the challenges still hindering widespread adoption and where potential users can expect the market to go as we move through 2011 and beyond. Companies mentioned in this report include Yahoo, Facebook, EMC, Teradata and Appistry. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Some of the groundwork is finally being laid for mobile payments, but the industry still has to find ways to convince users to pay for stuff with their phones. For the mobile wallet to catch on, apps will have to do much more than execute transactions. Read more »
Some might call this past quarter in the infrastructure space transformative. The rise of ARM-based processing suggests the days of x86 dominance might be coming to an end, while the Amazon Web Services-WikiLeaks controversy cast new light on the legal aspects of cloud computing. Big data got bigger, meanwhile, as the Hadoop ecosystem expanded, and amid all these cutting-edge technologies, two archaic topics — Novell and Java — proved they aren’t going anywhere soon. Companies mentioned in this report include Intel, AMD, Amazon Web Services, IBM, Yahoo, Appistry, VMware, Joyent and Microsoft. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In Silicon Valley, history often repeats itself. Most often it’s the tale of a startup that captures the attention of millions and topples its bigger, incumbent competitors. Then it becomes hated monopoly, despised for the control it wields. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, this ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The always-unpredictable mobile space enters 2011 at a particularly dynamic time. Carriers are now bringing 4G networks online, even as their definitions of “4G” vary. Meanwhile, mobile data consumption is exploding and the FCC trying to settle on policies both to regulate the industry and to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
“Local” and “social” go together like bread and butter. Add “mobile” and you’ve a trio of hot technologies that’s attracting capital from investors and big companies alike. For consumers, there are obvious synergistic experiences: mobility is local by definition, as are many social activities like physical-world ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The location wars are heating up just in time for the holidays. Location-based services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, SCVGR, Yelp and others have brought out big-name partners and expanded rewards to help give the check-in services a big push at the end of the year. Read more »
Google’s new local recommendation service with the unusual name — HotPot — can leverage the information that the search giant has about you (if you provide it), but it is still at a huge disadvantage compared with established apps like Yelp, and social networks such as Facebook. Read more »
There’s been a flurry of activity lately in local mobile advertising, often dubbed the Holy Grail of marketing. Players like Google and Facebook have a distinct competitive edge thanks to their sheer size, but smaller guys can succeed they keep a few key things in mind. Read more »
Location-based shopping services (LBS) have made many headlines recently, and studies have shown that users actually like receiving ads and offers well-targeted to their interests. Couple that with an influx of Tier 1 venture capital and the show-stopping Facebook Places, with which several startups have already joined forces, and it’s no wonder LBS is suddenly such a hot topic in the mobile sector. That doesn’t necessarily mean LBS shopping apps will be easy to implement. A number of challenges — privacy concerns, scaling issues and check-in integrity among them — provide a potential barrier to widespread adoption. This note examines both the drivers and inhibitors for making location-based shopping services a mainstream phenomenon, and includes focused profiles of Facebook, Twitter, Google, Loopt, Foursquare, BrightKite, Whrrl, Gowalla, Plancast, Groupon, AisleBuyer, Bizness Apps, Offeretti, ShopAlerts, Shopkick, Bakodo, Stickybits, Yelp!, Geodelic Sherpa, WHERE, MyTown, InCrowd, SCVNGR, Waze and Layar. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Groupon says it expects to end the year with as many as 25 million subscribers and $400 million in sales. Chief operating officer Rob Solomon also says the company’s promotional campaign for The Gap was so successful it has been fielding calls from other national advertisers. Read more »
Facebook’s real focus with the launch of Places isn’t individual users or even Foursquare: instead, it sees the service as a way of making a major push into local businesses and local advertising markets, and the company with the most to lose isn’t Foursquare but Yelp. Read more »
Earlier this week I met with Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley and we discussed everything from Facebook to check-in fatigues and the copycats. I have synthesized our conversation to give you a good idea of how Dennis is thinking about Foursquare, social web and geolocation. Read more »
Enter Bearhug, a new “customer engagement platform” that provides businesses with something better than a basic support ticket customer feedback system; an app that enables them to hear what customers are experiencing and saying and actually do something about it. Read more »
In-app advertising — or “appvertising” — has quickly matured from a novel new marketing platform into a bona fide strategy for delivering pitches directly to consumers on their mobile devices, and the ever-increasing supply of apps on the market is giving advertisers endless opportunities to reach consumers. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Though Yelp steadfastly denies allegations — and now lawsuits — that its salespeople pressure businesses to buy advertising to remove negative reviews, the company tonight addressed them head-on. Specifically, it will become more transparent about its filtering process and give less favorable treatment to advertisers. Read more »
Building a business that is largely based on user-generated content seems like a great idea, until those users decide to post what they want instead of what you want. Amazon and Yelp are two of the most recent companies to experience the downside of user-generated reviews. Read more »
Social web behavior is increasingly filling the need for a traditional search engine, but you can’t monetize the social web by transferring over search advertising. What does that mean for Google, and what are some of the most promising ways startups are filling the gap? Read more »
As Yelp is learning, trust is a hard thing to win — but amazingly easy to lose. And that’s why it needs to be protected with the corporate equivalent of the Praetorian Guard. To that end, here are three trust-related rules to live by. Read more »
Augmented Reality (AR) is a hot topic in the app stores these days. So, what’s AR? It’s multiple technologies being used simultaneously to provide you with data relevant to your location. This includes your phone’s compass to determine the direction you are facing, GPS to determine […] Read more »
Yelp was yesterday slammed with a prospective class action lawsuit over unfair business practices. To that I say, it’s about time! There have been rumblings and bitchings and stories for years about Yelp salespeople pressuring local businesses to pay to remove negative user reviews. Read more »
Google last week took the wraps off Buzz, which — as if you haven’t heard — is the company’s latest play in its never-ending quest to be a player in the social-web space. The all-things-to-all-people effort combines elements of Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare, encouraging users to ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Foursquare is working with Zagat, HBO and other high-profile media brands to get a leg up on competitors like Gowalla and Yelp. The partnerships will provide valuable exposure and content as Foursquare tries to differentiate itself in the white-hot location-based social recommendation space. Read more »
Yelp, like Facebook and Zynga before it, has taken a large late-stage funding round that includes measures to cash out employee shares. In doing so, the local reviews startup effectively negates internal pressure for a public offering to make early employees rich. Read more »
AT&T is developing a Yelp-like site to offer user reviews and recommendations. While it’s late to the social recommendation party, and as such faces a small army of competitors, AT&T has the relationships and massive scale to help make its Buzz.com service a success. Read more »
Yelp is stepping up its game against Foursquare and Gowalla by adding “check-ins” by users to its reviews. But will be enough? Or will Foursquare and/or Gowalla make for a simpler user experience and therefore a significant competitive threat? Read more »
Mobile augmented reality (AR) brings computer-generated multimedia into an end-user’s literal field of vision. It merges real-time digital information with the user’s perceptions of his or her immediate physical surroundings. The mobile AR user simultaneously experiences physical reality and digital media consumption. This report looks at the growing mobile AR ecosystem, from the technologies and trends supporting its development to the applications, players, and business models driving innovation. The report includes a forecast for the number of mobile AR–capable devices, summarizes existing revenue forecasts for the nascent market, and leverages three in-depth case studies to demonstrate the intersections between markets, technologies, and companies in emerging applications. Read more »
“What is Twitter, anyway?” I’ve been asked questions like that many times, as I’m sure most web workers have. “The Social Media Marketing Book” by tech writer Dan Zarrella, attempts to explain Twitter, blogs, Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, Second Life, Yelp, and even such sites as Rate […] Read more »
Reports that Google nearly paid about $500 million to acquire local review site Yelp are drawing even more attention to the already-hot local business search/review space and fueling debate over the merits of various local search models. While some would say that real-time, location-aware social search ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
My search for a top-notch ramen joint returned quality recommendations from both Twitter (as to the restaurant) and Foursquare (as to actual menu items), all in near-real time. Which made me wonder if services like Yelp have a future in our increasingly always-connected world. Read more »
