Chomp: An Apps Search Engine Or “Yelp For The App Store”
Chomp could be described as a search engine for iPhone apps (and eventually other apps stores). It’s a two-month old iPhone app and more recently a website, which resembles Twitter, whose objective is to enable people to more easily discover and review iPhone apps.
The proliferation of 160,000 iPhone apps has created the well-documented problem of [...]
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Yelp Sued for Extortion—Again
A year ago, we first covered the extortion rumblings against local review site Yelp. Business owners claimed that Yelp offered to remove negative reviews—for a price. Yelp disputed the allegations, but did add a feature for business owners to respond to negative reviews last April.
But apparently the other practices haven’t ceased, according to two suits recently filed against Yelp. Last week, a class action suit was filed in a Los Angeles federal court, and this week another suit alleging extortion by the site was filed in California as well.
The first suit,Cats and Dogs Animal Hospital Inc. v. Yelp Inc., alleges “the company’s employees call businesses demanding monthly payments in the guise of advertising contracts, in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews.” The second suit, D’Ames Day Spa v. Yelp, makes a similar accusation, stating that Yelp removed 13 of 14 positive reviews because the spa wouldn’t buy advertising on the site.
Yelp has responded to the allegations in a blog post, “Different Day, Different Lawyer, Same Meritless Claim: A Classic Race to the Courthouse.” Yelp points to a paragraph from the suit where the spa owner says she encouraged customers to leave reviews on the site. Said Yelp CEO Jeremy Stoppelman:
As we have explained in the past, solicited reviews, more so than naturally occurring ones, are more likely to be detected by Yelp’s review filter, which we employ to protect consumers from shill reviews and businesses from malicious reviews from competitors.
Stoppelman says they’re taking both cases seriously—but they’re both without merit and Yelp is confident they’ll prevail.
What do you think? Is Yelp extorting SMBs, or is it the other way around?
Class Action Lawsuit Filed Against Yelp Alleging “Extortion”
It must be the season for litigation. Two class action law firms have filed suit in Los Angeles federal court claiming that Yelp has attempted to “extort” money from small businesses by offering to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment. The suit contends:
Yelp runs an extortion scheme in which the company’s employees call businesses [...]
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Does CityGrid “Answer” The Local SEO Problem?
Ad one time local startups could reliably count on Google organic traffic to help build their own traffic and brands. Indeed, this is how Yelp gained visibility in its early days. And larger publishers such as yellow pages sites have relied heavily on seo as well to drive traffic to their advertisers. However recently that’s [...]
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Yelp Ratings Appear In Google AdWords
I received a screenshot in email of an AdWords ad for a San Diego auto repair shop that featured Yelp ratings (and a link to the Yelp review) in the AdWords copy. Here’s a screen of the ad:
Detail:
Google has been making AdWords richer, with product images and maps (and so on) in the ad copy:
However [...]
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AT&T Planning To Launch Yelp-Like Site Buzz.com
Forbes covers AT&T’s forthcoming local recommendations site Buzz.com. It aims to be a place where people can get and share recommendations about local businesses. Despite my headline and that of the Forbes article it’s not going to be a reviews and social networking site like Yelp. Rather it may be more analogous to AlikeList or [...]
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Yelp Gives Its Reviews a Location Twist
The review site Yelp has been interesting to watch over time. It gets a lot of interest from different businesses like Google who was interested buying it. Then it gets more investment from VC’s when those deals don’t pan out. It has been vilified for business practices and then has worked to make the service more ‘balanced’ as well. Regardless of your point of view of the service it certainly has established itself as the leader in the small business online review space. This month’s Inc. magazine’s cover story is on the service (take note of the what not to do story that opens the piece ….. creepy.)
Now Yelp is looking to make the service even more interesting by adding a location based feature that allows reviewers to show how many times they have “checked in” to a location that they have reviewed. Mashable tells us more
Last week, the battle for your check-ins took an interesting new turn as Yelp rolled out a set of location features for its iPhone app. Today, Yelp’s expanding the feature to include check-in information alongside user reviews on its website.
With that small step, you can see exactly why check-ins are such a big deal for Yelp and a big threat to upstarts like Foursquare and Gowalla. We’re told that Yelp just passed nine million reviews, and now, with the ability to connect check-in data to individual reviews, the company is hoping to add further credibility to its users’ ratings.
According to the article this feature is only available for iPhone apps but versions for Android, BlackBerry and the like are on the horizon. Here’s a look at how these check-in appear in a review.
They also show up in a user’s profile by their reviews. This is important because it gives some level of participation to the site by giving users the ability to add more depth and credibility to their reviews if they have repeatedly “checked in” from that location.
Mashable’s Adam Ostrow makes an interesting observation about this feature as it relates to the level of competition this service could provide to a much smaller high flyer of late, Foursquare, which is a location based ‘game’.
……..the most interesting aspect of Foursquare is not the game, but seeing where your friends are, and Yelp’s doing that too. Given Yelp has a big headstart, it’s hard not to see it representing a big threat to the startups — though Facebook and its expected location features still loom large as well.
I am not a participant in any of these location-based activities personally. There are a lot of reasons for it and I explain a few here. Whether I use it or not though is obviously not the point. There appears to be a real growing wave of moving toward filling this apparent obsession of knowing where everyone is at all times and letting them know where you are. It’s like a location tweet of sorts.
As marketers, there could be tremendous value that will be discovered with time. Who will be the players that really take advantage of it and allow themselves to ‘stub their toes’ early on in the ‘monetization of location’ game should be fun to watch.
Are you seeing any real effective early adopters marketers who leverage location based services out there? Do tell.
Google Tells What is “Near You Now”
What’s with Google and their constant upgrades and innovations? What is it with these guys? You would think that they are trying to improve and stuff. The latest, and personally I think one of the coolest, service introductions is the “Near You Now” feature on Google.com for mobile.
It’s pretty simple. Your location is known by Google (if you allow it of course) so it simply tells you what is “near you now” with regard to restaurants, local services (i.e. animal hospitals, dentists, drugstores, gyms, parking lots etc), coffee shops, lodging, shopping and a lot more.
Google’s blog tells us a bit more:
“Near me now” was designed to address two user problems. First, we wanted to make it fast and easy to find out more about a place in your immediate vicinity, whether you’re standing right in front of a business or if it’s just a short walk away.
Second, we wanted to make searching for popular categories of nearby places really simple. Imagine that you emerge from the subway station and you want to grab a coffee, but you don’t see a coffee shop around you. You can simply search for all nearby coffee shops by using “Near me now”. To search other categories of places not shown, “Browse more categories” provides access to our local search product with more category choices.
Pretty slick. Watch out other local apps like Yelp. This one really works although I can’t figure out why my location keeps coming up with Chinese characters but I’ll survive (neither me or my iPod have been to China unless that’s where it was “born”?). Anyway, “Near me now” is currently available in the US for iPhone (OS 3.x) or Android-powered devices with version 2.0.1 or later.
While this video demo is one of the cheesiest ever, it does show how the service works. Try to ignore the music, I dare you.
Google’s Near Me Now: A Yelp Killer?
Just a couple weeks after failing to consummate a rumored deal to buy Yelp, Google has launched a mobile search tool that could take away the mobile market share of Yelp and similar sites/apps like Urbanspoon, MapQuest, and some of the yellow pages apps.
It’s called “Near Me Now,” and Google previewed it last month — [...]
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Google and Yelp a “No Go”
As the great Yogi Berra once said, “It ain’t over ‘til it’s over” and the deal between Yelp and Google is the latest proof of that. In the Internet space in particular an extra dose of caution is recommended when hearing a ‘rumor’ (i.e. something that comes on ‘good authority’ and is almost a done deal) to take a step back and give the rumor a chance to breathe. Unlike a bottle of fine wine, though, rumors in this space often go south but that’s just part of the space.
The latest ‘event’ that received the treatment of a lot of attention but didn’t finish as rumored was the ‘deal’ between Google and Yelp. Last week we told you of TechCrunch’s report on the imminent Google deal to purchase Yelp.
Google and Yelp are in advanced acquisition negotiations, we’ve confirmed from multiple sources. And while the deal isn’t done, we’ve heard that it’s very likely to close. The price is supposedly at least $500 million.
Well, TechCrunch reports that this deal has derailed and that Yelp is walking away from a significant offer.
The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition.
Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources.
That something must have been pretty big and pretty sudden. These negotiations take a considerable amount of time to get to the point where an anonymous source gets the itch to leak the ‘truth’ to the Internet media press. This information was leaked but apparently there were a few landmines that were not seen or not considered ‘deal breakers’.
One can speculate all day long as to why this deal fell apart but we are not going down that road. In fact, until something is officially noted by either company (which may or may not happen) we’ll sit on the sidelines for now.
So with everything in life and, in particular the Internet marketing industry, step on the rumor mill with your grain of salt handy. As for now let us know if this is good news that the deal fell through or were you thinking there was some good to come out of the acquisition.
