Local review site Yelp is not going to sit around and let competitor CitySearch have even a day to celebrate their new beta launch.
CEO Jeremy Stopellman, noticing our Comscore comparison of the services - “According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques)” - emailed us with some of their internal traffic numbers and stats.
Yelp’s Google Analytics stats for the past thirty days show 15.8 million unique visitors, way above the six million Comscore records. And Yelp also shows other interesting stats in the chart below: 4 million reviews, with 34% restaurants, 23% shopping, 8% beauty and fitness, etc. Users are 51% male and 49% female, and 65% have a college degree.
Not bad for a company that was born just four years ago.
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If you don’t know what being RickRolled is, go look it up because you don’t want to be the last person to figure it out. YouTube even RickRolled its own users as an April Fools joke.
Anyway, tonight I get a call on my mobile phone. And it’s that damn song. Apparently it’s some new startup called Twilio, and according to a Facebook message it was initiated by Dave McClure, who is probably advising them.
Congratulations Dave, you’ve found a unique way of bugging me. Hope there’s more to the business than that. Did you get my text message thanking you?
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Jeff Bonforte never met an API he didn’t like. The CEO of Xobni, a startup that makes an outlook plug-in that makes your e-mail smarter, has been busy getting his team of engineers to integrate every possible API they can think of into the service. Xobni already added LinkedIn last June. Today it is adding integrations with Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, and Hoovers. Data from all of these services appears in the Xobni sidebar in Outlook. Let’s take them one by one.
Xobni has been working on its Yahoo Mail integration since last April. Now in the sidebar, users can search their Yahoo Mail messages and see contacts and attachments. To send or receive email through your Yahoo account, however, you still have to click through to Yahoo Mail in your browser, which is sub-optimal.
Every time someone sends you an email who is also a Facebook member, you can see in the sidebar their current Facebook status message, general profile information, their Facebook picture, and recent updates made to their profile.
The Skype feature lets you send instant messages, SMS messages, and make Skype or regular calls to contacts who are also Skype users. Again, as with Yahoo Mail, actually making a call or sending an IM automatically launches the Skype application.
Finally, the Hoover API brings up Hoover company information for each contact. That provides some helpful context when responding to business emails, although I find the LinkedIn data more useful.
Citysearch is finally coming around to replacing its creaking site design with something a little more contemporary. Today, it is launching in a major rethink of its entire site in beta that drills deeper into neighborhoods, uses Facebook Connect as an optional identity system, and lets users vote reviews up and down. The beta will quickly become the default Citysearch experience. During a demo at IAC headquarters yesterday, Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti told me:
We’ve been working on it for 10 months and built everything from ground up. In Q1 we will be turning off every system that operates Citysearch today, and running everything in the new environment.
Citysearch’s engineers stripped out the decade-old proprietary code that runs Citysearch and replaced it with open-source code. By replacing what’s under the hood, they were freed up to make some major improvements that are immediately apparent. The main changes are:
1. Hyper-local content. Citysearch is currently organized by city, so no matter what neighborhood you are looking at you get the same city guide. With the beta, Citysearch has mapped each city by neighborhood and placed each restaurant, bar, hotel, theater, or other local business in a specific neighborhood. So now when you are looking for things to do in a given neighborhood, Citysearch can dynamically create a neighborhood guide complete with restaurants, shops, and other businesses. With this one change, Citysearch is going from 140 cities to 75,000 neighborhoods by the end of the year.
2. Hyper-social content (Facebook Connect). This is one of the biggest changes. Citysearch has only 4 million registered users, but it will now adopt Facebook Connect as an optional identity system. That means anytime someone wants to submit a review or rating who isn’t already a registered Citysearch user will be able to simply type in their Facebook username and password. Any review or rating can then appear on your in Facebook feed, just like with the old Beacon program, except with Facebook Connect it’s all opt-in. (Citysearch was an original Beacon partner, but it shut that down long ago). “Friends love to talk to other friends about local businesses,” notes Herratti.
Even better, anytime you see reviews for a particular restaurant or business,reviews from your Facebook friends will show up first. We were wondering when Facebook Connect partners would start announcing their implementations.
3. Rebalancing the power between reviewers, merchants, and editors. Instead of highlighting Citysearch’s editorial voice, the design has been tweaked so that underneath each entry thereare now three columns representing the voice of the business owner, the Citysearch editor, and the user reviewers. Citysearch reviews have become so crucial for many restaurants and bars that they’ve also become suspect in that many businesses try to game the system. Herrati says:
We are looking to restore the balance of content in the local space. By that I mean we feel UGC has been so powerful in this arena, but it also comes with a bag of issues.
So not only do business owners now have their own more prominent column to promote their business, but the reviews are now voted up or down so that the community can self-moderate the most obviously abusive comments.
4. A better mobile experience Finally, since everything has been remapped by neighborhood, Citysearch is well positioned for mobile apps. But Citysearch is also working hard to optimize the experience for mobile browsers. It is using the geo-location API in Google Gears to surface nearby results for anyone using a phone running Windows Mobile 5 or higher. For everyone else, it remembers the last destination you specified by typing into your phone. t is also working on specific apps for phones with GPS chips. An iPhone app will come later this quarter, and Android and Blackberry apps are also in the works.
Overall, Citysearch is taking some big steps in the right direction. Facebook Connect is going to be huge for the site. With the turn of a switch, it now has social features it would have been nearly impossible to build on its own. Who wantsto become someone else’s friend on Citysearch? But if you can find your existing friends there, that is one more reason to use it.
In practice, it still has a ways to go in terms of bringing up the best results at the neighborhood level. At least that was the case for my neighborhood in Brooklyn. The top result for dining brought up a restaurant that went out of business a long time ago. Too bad you can’t vote search results up and down.
In terms of Citysearch’s business, though, the hyperlocal results will really help with its local search business. The one part of the new Cityseearch that is not open-source is Citysearch Pay, its pay-for-performance ad engine that turns up sponsored results on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood level. In teh future, it will introduce “event variable price per lead.” Basically, that means businesses will be able to bid on how much they are willing to pay for different types of leads. Viewing a geo-proximate ad on a mobile phone could be one type of lead, texting an address to a friend could be another, as could playing a video profile of a business or making a reservation.
And these types of ads would not be limited to its own site. Citysearch also operates an ad network for partner sites looking to bring more local content. Herrati explains:
Between a quarter and at third of revenues comes from the ad network. If you look at impressions and uniques, it crushes our network.
The ad network’s reach crushes it by ten to one. According to comScore, Citysearch brought in 14.6 million unique visitors in the U.S in October, compared to 143 million uniques across its ad network. (Yelp, by the way, did 6 million uniques). By doing abetter job mapping all of its data on local businesses, Citysearch should be able to boost the relevance of its search results and therefore how much it gets paid for them. Maybe Barry Diller should start breaking out results for Citysearch now that IAC is a smaller entity.
Earlier this year we watched as Redlasso, a very popular video service that allowed bloggers to clip portions of television content, got beaten into submission (at least temporarily) by a flurry of lawsuits. The company’s platform gave bloggers access to content spanning popular channels including CNN and ESPN almost immediately after it aired, and was a favorite across blogs like The Huffington Post and others. Unfortunately, Redlasso didn’t secure any rights to the content it was distributing, and it wasn’t long before the networks started to crack down. Now 1Cast, a new startup launching today in private beta, is looking to fill the void left by Redlasso by offering similar clips of recent television footage with one key distinction: it has all been fully licensed. TechCrunch readers can grab one of 1000 invites here.
At launch the site is offering content from Reuters, CNBC, CBC, AP and the AFP, and plans to have more content partners by the end of the year. Footage is sorted into categories including Sports and Headlines, as well as by individual network. Unlike Redlasso, which used its own recording system, 1Cast receives its content directly from its partners. At this point it sounds like some of the networks are slower than others in getting their content distributed (quick turn around was one of the things that made Redlasso so appealing), but they are expected to speed up over time.
Instead of appealing exclusively to bloggers, 1Cast is trying to serve a more general market by allowing users to create frequently updated video ‘channels’ on topics they’re interested in, which can be embedded on blogs and are also viewable on the iPhone/iPod Touch (it’s sort of like your own personal news network).
In practice the service seems to work adequately well, though I have some problems with it. For one, searching for a specific clip is difficult - videos are all broken into ‘channels’ and grouped with other videos on the same topic, but it’s hard to tell what each clip is actually about without watching it. And it seems that every time you want to watch a clip you need to sit through the ads attached, which gets really annoying when you weren’t interested in it in the first place.
1Cast may catch on with the general public, who may be more interested in the ‘personal news channel’ aspect of the site rather than being able to embed a breaking news clip on their blog. But until the site has a larger collection of content and a better way to search through it, it probably won’t appeal to the same blogger audience that Redlasso did.
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Each month, AdMob, a mobile advertising network, rounds up the data from over 6,000 mobile websites and applications, analyzes it all, and releases their findings in their Mobile Metrics Report. In the September report, AdMob determined that the iPhone had become the #4 handset worldwide by count of ads requested. In the October release, the iPhone has skyrocketed all the way to #1.
Note that these rankings are not directly representative of sales numbers; while AdMob’s ad network is wide enough that these numbers can provide an accurate picture of usage trends, they don’t necessarily prove that one handset is outselling another.
September vs October Worldwide handset rankings:
Within the Top 5, the only major change is the iPhones sudden surge. Below that however, notice the BlackBerry 8100s sudden disappearance from the list - it has shifted down to #11, sitting just below the BlackBerry 8300. Why might this be? Well, the 8100 is a good half year older than the 8300 - chances are, more 8100s are reaching retirement.
September vs October US handset rankings:
In September, we were a bit surprised to see the iPhone sitting all the way down at #7 in the US while it managed to snag the #4 spot worldwide. In October, the iPhone’s rank seems a bit more well aligned with it’s worldwide status, coming in at #2. iPhone requests have more than doubled, allowing it to knock the KRZR down a notch. The rest of the list moves in relation, though as with the worldwide rankings, we see the BlackBerry 8300 climb as the 8100 sinks.
One thing to note with all of these statistics, however, is that AdMob advertisements embedded into iPhone applications are counted alongside web site statistics. If these same advertisements are not embedded into applications on all of the other platforms, wouldn’t the numbers be skewed in favor of the iPhone? Even if they were given the same real estate across all platforms, third-party applications are a far more significant part of the iPhone than they are of the vast majority of devices; if you own an iPhone, chances are great that you’ve installed (and regularly use) a handful of applications. Can you really say the same about the KRZR, or the Kyocera K24? Wouldn’t this, too, skew things a bit? I’d be interested in seeing how the data changes when limited to any website accessible by smartphone.
Other interesting tid bits from the report:
If you’ve got a couple hours to kill tearing through page upon page of statistics (now including stats for Latin America!), you can find the full report here.
Sequoia-backed visual search engine SearchMe finally got approval on their iPhone application - it appears to have been sitting at Apple waiting for approval for over two months.
Well, it was worth the wait. Like Google’s voice recognition app, it’s a much better search experience than the default Google search built into the iPhone browser. The app gives you a visual preview of all search results, which is a noticeably better way of searching on a small screen with a small virtual keyboard.
It isn’t in the app store yet directory yet, but you can download it here.
As an aside, will an iPhone developer please send me a screen shot of the “review pending” page that you have to look at day after day as you wait weeks, or possibly months, for Apple to get around to approving your app?
For years, people have been turning to the web to ask perfect strangers for advice. But while largely anoymized services like Yahoo Answers have proven to be hugely popular, there’s something to be said for getting advice from people you actually know. Last month we wrote about Aardvark, a social search engine in private beta built by The Mechanical Zoo that distributes your searches across your social graph for quick, highly accurate results that are likely more credible than what you’d get from Yahoo Answers or a normal search engine. Today sees the public launch of another social advice site called Mobspin that is also leveraging the social graph, though in a slightly different manner.
Mobspin CEO Roy Goldman says that while Aardvark is a good service for questions that need near-immediate answers, many questions aren’t that urgent, which is why Mobspin is taking a more passive approach.
To use the site, you first submit a question that you’d like your friends’ help with. But rather than sending out an immediate alert to your friends letting them know that you’d like some help, the site instead sends them sporadic Email digests at intervals they’ve set. Goldman says that friends are generally eager to help anyway, and don’t need to be hit over the head with obnoxious and frequent requests. To help build up your friends list, the site has deep support for Facebook, allowing you to import your friends list as well as syndicate your questions to Facebook News Feeds.
You can also get an overview of the questions you’ve been asked at the Mobspin homepage, which allows users to filter questions by the people who have asked them (you can choose to view questions only from your friends, friends of friends, and so on). The site is also looking to serve as a repository for questions and answers - all submissions will be searchable by keyword, but will be stripped of any identifiable personal data. You can also leave reviews on the site, which are also included in the index.
Mobspin’s biggest obstacle will lie in obtaining critical mass - there isn’t much point in searching the database or submitting a question if you can never find a relevant answer. But it’s a quick way to ask your friends questions, and, unlike Aardvark, it’s publicly available. The site will be going up against a few other similar services, including Ruba, GigPark, and Yotify, which we covered here.