Tech Coast Review
The startup and tech news weblog for Southern California

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Local.com fancy public company with patent and no real content

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Irvine based Local.com is an interesting public company.  It is a local content and search aggregator, that launched back in 2005.  They've been making headlines in the last few months with a major patent approved for local search, as well as partnerships to aggregate business review content from the two biggest user generated content sites: Citysearch and Yelp.


Between the domain name and the fact that their poring millions into advertising to buy users to their site, they have great traffic, with at least 5 million monthly users.  Now here lies the rub, local.com is essentially just a geographically focused search engine, and in some ways competes against the likes of almighty Google.  For example if you are looking for a mexican restaurant in Los Angeles, they will give you indexed results of mexican restaurants in LA.   Google similarly does this in their business map section.  In both cases they are search focused, meaning that the actual content doesn't originate from Google or Local, it merely is indexed from other sites like CitySearch or Yelp.  What makes this interesting, is that Google can run local search as an extension of regular search and can afford to build a similar product, without having to 'buy' customers.  Local.com can't do that, and has to resort to paying a hefty chunk in advertising to get people to its site.  But being that its a search engine, people are leaving the site as soon as they find what they are looking for.  Those people are then spending their time on a place like citysearch where the real content is.    Ultimately, this makes Local.com's business model questionable, they are paying for people who are not really engaging their site. 

While I'd be the first to agree about the huge advertising potential in local revenue, local.com is bleeding far to much money, to really make geographic advertising work.  Further, as a company that doesn't offer its own unique content, its pinned up to fight against Google.  Now I know theirs chinks in Googles armour, but you have to have a far more revolutionary product if you are going to go up against them in the search space.  While locals resuts are maybe a bit better then Googles, its certainly not enough to convert users. At least not this user anyways.

 
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Wednesday, January 30, 2008

ThisNext gets more VC funding

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Santa Monica based shopping 2.0 site, ThisNext, recently received another 5M in a series B round from their previous investors Clearstone Venture Partners and Anthem Venture Partners (according to Techcrunch) .  This backs up their Series A round of 3.5M.  They also may raise another 2-3M in debt financing (according to socalTECH).


We have already profiled thisnext here, and the general mixed review still stands.  They've also received mixed reviews from others, so the real question is whats up with total 11 Million+ these guys could potentially be sitting on?  Apparently its for growth capital and more employees, but geez it seems like a crazy burn rate to me.  Sure they have steady traffic growth, but I'm still not convinced they are doing anything so revolutionary to justify the valuation.  Much like mahalo, I think these guys are probably just doing well making the funding rounds because of their connection with Jason Calacanis.  Sometimes I wonder if VCs just seem to throw gobs of money at companies connected with serial entrepreneurs, and throw out the level of scrutiny they extend to unproven startups.  In many ways, this is a shame, serial entrepreneurs many times have mediocre ideas the second time around, whereas there are many good startups that struggle to get funding because of their inherent unproven nature.  And while understand the value of mitigating risk, the current trend of extending strong funding to serial entrepreneurs because of their track record, not their idea, maybe tipping the risk balance the wrong way. 

 
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Tuesday, January 29, 2008

A Love Hate Relationship With eCost

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eCost is an El Segundo based whole seller of new, refurbished, and discontinued merchandise. They are a publicly traded company (Nasdaq: PFSW), and have been around since the early 2000's, this review has come in the wake of my holiday season and not being sure where to get the best deal on all sorts of electronics. So here is a brief overview:

You get on the site and there a too much going on from blazing fires in the corner to 10 large ads trying to sell me on the newest gizmos. In reality this is not all bad, I did come here looking to purchase stuff so I was ready for the visual barrage. Next I ran a few searches and noticed that they seem to carry just about every electronic gadget on the market and best of all their prices were usually cheaper than the vast majority of the stores on Google Shopping (I still miss the catchy name of Froogle).

Upon checkout you come to realize you must have an account, this annoys me but I do realize the utility in storing user information. Right before attempting to complete the transaction I get an offer for "Platinum Premium" membership where they assure me that I will get better deals for only $39.95/year! If this doesn't irritate me enough it says that if I am upgrading from their old Platinum membership I only have to pay $8.95 to become a Platinum Premium member. This leaves me wondering how excited will eCost be when a new element more valuable than Platinum is invented so they can charge even more for "member benefits." And how long will it take eCost to change form "New Element Membership" to "New Element Premium Membership?"

I am never a fan of buying something (ie membership) before buying something (ie digital camera). Overall I could have see eCost being a solid site and a major competitor for the new meta-search technology of sites like Google Shopping but with memberships alienating their users I have doubt eCost will ever have a major impact on how we buy our electronics...

I wonder what Woot.com is selling today?

 
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Monday, January 28, 2008

Break.com becomes mini google with mens ad network

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Beverly Hills based, Break.com is a video sharing social site that targets 18-30 male demographic. They basically focus on funny, crazy, stupid guy humor. As a hypertargeted Youtube clone, they have been doing well for themselves, steadily climbing to traffic upwards of 18 million uniques per month. Today they announced an ad network that extends their strong inventory reach to smaller web publishers.

While I'm not a big fan of Break, because they don't do anything fundamentally innovative (other than taking social video to an obvious niche), they are executing rather well. A year and half ago, they announced that they were going to pay publishers a semi flat rate for uploaded videos that make it to the front page. This has worked well for them because it gives an incentive for common bread and butter users who upload good (though often fake) videos to the site but aren't necessarily people who are trying to make full-time money off of it (ala Revver). They also have extended many partnerships with traditional tv publishers, clearly extending their reach further.

Now that Break.com has a good base, its incredibly smart move to sell/partner their ad inventory to smaller publishers. They have a strong sales and distribution channel that some stupid guy humor website would probably benefit well from compared to just throwing something like Adsense up. According to Techcrunch, they have 15 dedicated sales reps and have decent rates falling between $10 - $30 CPMs. So if you are small-medium sized website that sits in the mens or humor category that might pair well, partnering with Break is likely a much better deal then you'd do on your own.

As someone who falls into Breaks exact demographic and yet have very little interest in their site, I would have likely been not so kind in profiling them during their early stages. However Break continues to grow and execute well, and at the end of the day, that's what matters.

 
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Tuesday, January 22, 2008

Stickam the controversial web cam enabled social network

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I just ran across a video based social network company called stickam thats based out of LA.  What I found particularly amusing was the contraversy it caused a few months ago.  Stickam launched in 2006 as basicaly another myspace except it has live web cam functionality.   The streaming video is actually pretty cool, and lends itself to the myspace crowd quite well.  In fact particularly, at launch for the high school kids that weren't leaving Myspace for Facebook, there was a decent chunk that were leaving for Stickam.


Now here lies the problem, Stickam is owned by a parent company that also owns a few major porn sites.  Of course if you stop and think about it, it sort of make sense, who better to scale web cams to large social networking audiences, but porn site experts?  Clearly the issue here is the morality conflict that minors are likely the target demographic of Stickam, and obviously you want minors no where near the porn industry.  Though the truth is, besides a sort of handsoff relationship with the owner, its really hard to tell whether or not there is any real intermingling.  The New York Times article that originally broke the story, is mostly based off a disgruntled ex employee.  Obvisiously there was a bit of sensationalism, and its a hard call to know how big of an issue this really was.

In the few months since the NY Times article broke, Stickam's traffic has remained flat.  Did the article hamper the growth, or has the in crowd moved on to something else?  Is Stickam's chances of success done for?  Who knows, but I actually found watching people transfixed to the computer, while they were playing on stickam kind of interesting.  But then again, I'm not a minor, or a parent either.

 
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Monday, January 21, 2008

Thembid combines Craigslist Gigs with Ebay

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Riverside based Thembid is a reverse auction marketplace, where you post a service need and let businesses bid on the job.  They have been live to the public since early summer of 2007, and have notably demoed at the TechCrunch40 and recently at Twiistup.  


The Good

Thembid is an interesting concept that sort of takes the idea of the popular Craigslists classified section: gigs and refines it to a bidding process ala Ebay or LendingTree.  Besides bidding, you can also post regular classified ads.  They also have a rudimentary local directory that has basic business information, google map location, and the ability to rate and review the business.  

Just recently they extended all of these services via a whitelabel solution for even more niche areas of job bidding (such as construction).  If they can do a good job marketing that service, I imagine the whitelabel alone should help grow their customer base quite well.

The Bad

As with many web startups, until Thembid gets some traction, its not super useful.  Right now the jobs posted are very few and far between.  Thembid needs to figure out how to get more jobs up or else consumers and businesses alike aren't likely to tune in.  If I was to give them a suggestion, I'd say to figure out how to aggregate content from something like craigslist or maybe even monster, until they have enough unique content on their own to be self sustaining.  Also I'm not particularly confident with Thembid's business model.  Right now they are charging businesses 40 dollars to upgrade their profile, with the notion that more people are likely to choose a premium business over someone else.  Frankly though, right now theres not much of a bidding war, with the lack of activity on Thembid, and even if their was, I think most consumers are going to choose business with the lowest price and the best ratings, so I have a hard time seeing what businesses will pay for this.  Even still, many successful websites take awhile to figure out their exact business model, so if this premium service doesn't work out, assuming Thembid can gain traffic they'll probably be able to figure something out.

Conclusion:

Really its the traffic pattern that concerns me with Thembid.  From their initial release on to about three months after they were able to grow traffic to roughly 100k monthly users.  Not too shabby and definitely a good trend.  But then after the first three months, they've dropped down less then 5k users.  I'm not sure what exactly is going on here, but this is a bad bad sign.  Hopefully whatever Thembid is doing wrong traffic wise, they figure out, because they have a semi interesting service that I'd like to see continue to evolve.


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Friday, January 18, 2008

TechForward Online Gadget Pawn Shop Insurance

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Where do you go to get rid of your hot gadget gear from two years ago?  Well besides ebay.  Los Angeles based TechForward apparently is the place.  These guys, closed a Series A round from First Round Capital last year, with the semi unique idea of a buy-back/recycling site focused on tech gear. 


So how does it work? Well basically you buy a device (mainly a laptop or ipod) pay a one-time fee, and you are guaranteed to be able to sell back  to them and some rate.  A sort of trade in insurance for product that experience rapid changes in technology. 

At first glance, I actually think TechForward is a good idea, but under the hood there is some problems.  They have virtually no traffic to their website, probably because people perceive that its sort of a rip off.   For example I just got a new macbook and they are saying that for 29 dollars I can get the insurance and sell it back to them guaranteed for 400 dollars a year from now.  Thats crazy, year old macbooks could easily be sold on either ebay or craigslist for twice that.   So about the only thing this appeals to is some lazy guy who wants some money, from his gadgets, but not all the money.  Now that same lazy guy still has to go through the trouble of signing up for TechForward in the first place, and frankly that doesn't seem to add up.  

 
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Thursday, January 17, 2008

Uber bland myspace 2.0

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Los Angeles based Uber.com is yet another social network that tries to bring Myspace's artistic base in to the "uber-cool" web 2.o world.  Uber focuses on using the social graph to make your own website.  Which to me seems like doing nothing more then rewording customized profile page to make you think your getting something special.  


The one thing that would have been cool about Uber is the ability to bring in media from other social sources (such as youtube, flickr, etc) , which I guess you could use to create the ultimate aggregated website (profile) about yourself.  Unfortunately the way to do that wasn't particularly intuitive, and thus I'm left with nothing of interest to say about Uber.  Maybe the one surprise is that Uber some how seems to be gaining credible traffic (250K last month) despite the fact that no ones heard of it.  For the life of me, I can't figure out why they'd be gaining such decent traffic in such short time, so clearly someone sees something in Uber that I don't.  

 
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Wednesday, January 16, 2008

Dreamhost Overbilling shows how to start shit storm

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They say that no press, is bad press, especially in the Internet world, where links are gold.  However even then I don't think, Los Angeles based DreamHost is very happy that they are getting coverage all over the net (ref: TechCrunch, Infoworld, SocalTech DownloadSquad, etc, etc).  So what is Dreamhost?  Well basically just your everyday web hosting company.


There is nothing particularly noteworthy about Dreamhost, EXCEPT that they have lit a fire in the technosphere for overbilling ALL of their customers an entire year - adding up to a whopping  $7,500,000.00 in overcharges. 

Ok so understandable right, I mean humans make mistakes all the time, and companies certainly aren't immune (heck most startup companies are just a series of mistakes until they stumble on to something thats not a mistake).  The real problem, that is going to rake Dreamhost over the coals for the foreseeable future is the PR message they delivered.  In these days of new media, where companies try to have a hip blog that oozes their personality behind the machine, transparency becomes a double edged sword.   In Dreamhost's case their blog normally shows their funny, light-hearted nature, which appeals well to the techno geek looking for a good cheap hosting service.  Unfortunately, today when it means they screwed up with peoples money, light hearted joking is not the tone customers were wanting.  A sincere apology would have calmed a lot of the storm, but a lack of "official email notification" and instead just a blog post that references Homer Simpson, was not exactly what the doctor ordered.  Now 600 comments later (which are almost all negative), I'm sure Dreamhost's is feeling particularly sheepish.  

But to me though the crazy part wasn't even the tone that everyone is drilling them on.  Honestly I can write the tone off as another mistake, that was human error from the heat of the moment.  I'm sure they were just as surprised as everyone else to find the overbilling problem, and they probably just were overzealous in writing something quick on their blog to be as transparent as possible.  In this case though people weren't looking for transparency, but reassurance, and Dreamhost would have been better off stopping for a minute and putting a little PR face on.   

To me the crazy part is that this kind of glass transparency showed us something, that I think will be hard to recover from: lack of leadership.  Because despite the tonal problems, what to me is the core issue is how they tried to blame the problem on someone else.  The claim was that it was the "programmers" fault because the system was built too flexible.  This frankly is about as lame as an excuse gets.  And even if it wasn't, it doesnt matter whos fault it is, as the public head of a company, you take the blame - simple as that.

Ultimately if mistakes are measured by how you recover from them, DreamHost failed miserably.

 
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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

ProQuo Lands Series B Funding to Kill Junk Mail

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San Diego based startup company ProQuo today announced 8M in Series B funding (after receiving a $5M round last year) by Mission Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurveston.  So what are they doing with all this funding, dealing with email spam?  Nope, actually they are using the Internet to kill snail mail spam.


The Good
Their getting rid of junk mail, thats about as good as it gets!  
Basically you get presented a bunch of things that you get put on mailing lists for (coupons, credit cards, catalogs, etc.), and mostly all you have to do is click on the ones you dont want sent to you anymore and ProQuo handles the rest. In a few cases, ProQuo, can't automate it, so they give you instructions on what you need to do manually.  But either way, at the end of ProQuo session, you are pretty much guaranteed to get rid of a lot of that junk in you mailbox.

The Bad
Well there isn't a whole lot of bad things to talk about with ProQuo, they are free and they are providing a great service for consumers.  The one thing to point out is maybe the irony of their revenue model.  Like many free Internet services they are advertisement driven, which is kind of funny considering their company is about getting rid of advertisements in you mail.  Frankly though I'd rather see a few ads on the side of a website then a bunch of crap in my mailbox thats not only annoying me, but also killing trees for no good reason.

Conclusion
Only good things to come for ProQuo.  With the added capital, it will be interesting to see how they continue to expand their service.  They have already been well covered in the press and high profile blogs and they are picking up traffic and customers fast, so now its just a matter of sitting back and watching these guys grow.  

 
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Placely is a new travel tracking planner that falls short

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Los Angeles based, Placely is a new website for tracking travel plans.  A sort of super light version of a social graph that attempts to help  you keep in touch with people you meet during traveling or find other ones that are on a similar itinerary.

The Good
Placely focuses on real basic stuff, trying to coordinate events and people centered around travel.  There are plenty of better travel 2.0 sites out there, and quite a few more sophisticated sites that focus just on travel social networking, but maybe Placelys simple take on things will appeal to some?

The Bad
Placely honestly is a pretty weak entry, into the travel arena to me.  While the travel industry is certainly ripe for innovation and many web 2.0 capabilities continue to translate well into travel, it also is a heavily populated field to get into.  If your going to get into travel, you better have a big vision or a hyper niche, and Placely impresses me with neither.  Just by building some itinerary planning and throwing a bit of social in the mix is really not enough to make me think this will go anywhere.  

Conclusion
I'll be awfully surprised to see if Placely ends up anything more than a forgotten company that attempted to throw something "social" together during this web 2.0 bubble.  In some ways the best thing I think their service would be good for is something like a Facebook app, but there is already a bunch of those developed, since building basic itinerary stuff isn't all that hard.  So what then is Placelys good for?  Your guess is as good as mine.
 

 
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Monday, January 14, 2008

Mindtouch Business Wiki Software Plus Mashups

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San Diego based, Mindtouch is a wiki software maker focused on the enterprise.   They originally launched in 2005 and have had a steady stream of new features and new high profile customers (including heavy weights like Microsoft, Fujitsu, British Petroleum, Stanford University, and Mozilla).

Business wikis are a huge and growing market, and Mindtouch is definitely leading the way.  Mediawiki (the most popular wiki engine that powers Wikipedia, as well as many other sites) is a huge and complicated beast and not exactly well suited for businesses who just want to plug and go.  Mindtouch's DekiWiki product has 100k installations, focused on the enterprise, with a much easier deployment than MediaWiki.  Meaning that as a business DekiWiki is probably your top choice.  For those who care about open source companies, DekiWiki is an open source platform,  just like MediaWiki, so if your dev team is really up to snuff, you can probably modify just about anything.

As mentioned, Mindtouch has been really aggressive with their release cycles and are really moving DekiWiki from just a standard wiki to a full on service application platform.  The big thing they've released just recently, is the ability to include mashups in their wikis.  While at first this may seem like an unusual match, wikis are the most deployed web 2.0 technology in the enterprise and its probably a great way to introduce businesses to another hot web 2.0 tech: mashups.  Of course while mashups in the enterprise are less deployed and arguably less useful then consumer facing counterparts, there are still plenty of reasons a business may be interested in mashups.  Combining internal wiki data with Google Mapping or Flickr photo streams are just two useful way I could see the mashups being useful in enterprise applications, and I'm sure there many others.  In reality the question, to me is not a matter of whether or not mashups and wikis are a good match in the enterprise (they are), but rather can and will customers that use Dekiwiki have the resources to take advantage of it.  I would guess that given Mindtouch's main market are businesses who are looking for somewhat of a turn-key solutions, I would say the answer is probably no.  But regardless, its nice to see that Mindtouch is continuing to trying to innovate in the enterprise wiki space.  


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Thursday, January 10, 2008

Veoh to add MTV, VH1, Comedy Central, and more

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Following on the heals of last weeks article about San Diego based Veoh adding NBC and FOX content via Hulu, to become a sort of hyper aggregator of Video Content, Veoh has now also announced that they are adding MTV content (including Comedy Central, Nickelodean, VH1, CMT, Spike TV, as well as MTV proper).  Of course two things are different about this deal then the Veoh/Hulu deal: 1st there was no "official" Hulu deal, so kudus to MTV for trying to work with Veoh to distribute more of their content.  Unfortunately the second difference is that this is only an announcement, none of the official content is live yet :-(



 
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Wednesday, January 9, 2008

Userplane and friendster api

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Los Angeles based Userplane, is an application service provider that specializes in web 2.0 chat and video. They were originally founded in 2001 and were purchased by AOL in 2006. Yesterday they announced at CES that they are now supporting the friendster API so Friendster widget developers can add chat support into their own apps. They also have released their own friendster app so users can have another audio and video chat option within the friendster directory.


While frankly, nobody cares much about Friendster, Userplane working to support them is probably part of a broader strategy of getting as diversified as possible with social networking support. Especially considering that OpenSocial (to which Userplane has already announced it will support) is still in a fledgling stage and may or may not become the ubiquitous social network standard that was so touted. Of course standard APIs and easy Data portability between social networks is what most every developer really wants. But until that dream is realized, Userplane is forging ahead on their own. They've done a good job on that front, considering they already do Myspace and Facebook and now they've added Friendster.

 
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Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Geni introduces family news and timeline

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Los Angeles based Geni (who we profiled here), has moved another step closer to being the Facebook for family social profiles. They essentially took the Facebook concept of the news feed (ya the one with all the controversy) and the Facebook timeline and put it in Geni.  Sure its nothing revolutionary, but it does continue to round out Genis service as a social network for people who aren't looking for a social network.  And although, many continue to think Geni's 100M valuation is high, we should remember that LinkedIn is valued a 250M and Geni is basically doing for family connection what LinkedIn has done with business contacts.  


I also feel that as long as the family news feed doesn't get to excessive it actually will be a more welcome feature then Facebooks feed.  Frankly besides the viral benefits of the Facebook newsfeed, I really don't care what my Facebook friends are doing.  If they are my friends in real life, I probably know, and if they aren't then I don't really care.  With Geni though, I might care, because half my family could be across the country or the world, so I might be removed, yet still interested in their day to day activities.  Their timeline feature is also potentially more useful then what you'd get on Facebook, because its more about scrap-booking.  I suppose as you get older, documenting different parts of yours life becomes important to you, and Geni timeline/scrapbook really fits that bill.

All in all more good stuff from Geni.

 
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Monday, January 7, 2008

Another blow to DRM Napster goes Mp3 only

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The mother of all music sharing programs, Los Angeles based Napster has announced that they will be converting the entire library of music to MP3 Format.  This is great news considering the original rebel music sharing program has become the exact opposite of its original intent by aligning its technology platform with Windows Media "Play for Sure" DRM and all that was wrong with the music industry.  


Since Napster sold out, they've become nothing more than a me-too player in music subscriptions and sales.  They've never been the best at what they do, getting highly trounced by the one two combo of the ipod and itunes.  What's worse, as a public company, we all get to see just how non profitable these guys are.  So will the news of throwing off DRM revive napsters spunk and bring back, the edgy buzz of days gone by?  Probably not.  If anything this is more a commentary that the music industry is finally shifting back to a model of not treating all their customers like criminals.  So if anybody thought, this is the return of cool Napster, and that the hollow shell of corporation that holds its name, has finally got some edge...well, just return to your ipods, nothing new here.

 
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Saturday, January 5, 2008

Veoh adds Hulu content to further combine user generated video with network TV

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A lot of startups we've been reviewing are new companys that are still looking to break out, and haven't received a lot of mainstream coverage, so we have to do a bit of research first.  Veoh, is a San Diego based video sharing site that I actually use.  Although Veoh has been out for nearly 2 years, they just added video content from Hulu (who we reviewed here) and are beginning to really show their strategy of going beyond Youtube.


Veoh is fast turning into one of the best video site out there because they hyperaggregate official content from the networks as well rely on user generated content (and all the grey areas that that implies).  They have legitimate TV shows from their CBS deal as well as now having semi official shows from Fox and NBC via Hulu. They also are more liberal with taking down unofficial user uploaded content from networks that they don't have agreements with (like the way youtube USED to be), so if your savvy, your likely to find shows from the rest of the networks.  While I'm sure that this strategy is largely unspoken, it's incredibly smart, because it gives the consumers what their looking for until dumb TV lawyers finally begin to wizen up with how they handle Internet distribution.   A great example is that I used to watch 'unofficial' episodes of 24 on Veoh, last year, because it was one of better places to get it on the Internet.  Now I can officially watch 24 via Hulu/Veoh.  I don't care that there are ads now through the official channel, because it was never about not wanting the networks to get paid, I just wanted to watch 24 on the Internet, freely, on my own time.  Its basically a win-win-win, I benefit from getting the content I wanted, Veoh gets another user, and the networks now get the revenue they deserve from making the content.  

Veoh has high level of funding (24M to date from big names like Michael Eisner and Time Warner) giving them great flexibility to work out official deals with content providers, so I'm sure CBS, FOX, and NBC are just the first of even more official content we'll see on Veoh.  Then couple that thought with a track record that shows that Veoh in general gets what consumers want, and you'll see why Veoh is proving that Youtube is not the only new video distribution platform that can shake up the industry.


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Friday, January 4, 2008

Can Speeddate Woo us?

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If  your looking at at web 2.0 speed dating site and it seems like Deja Vu, you'd be right, we reviewed Woome exactly one month ago.  So what about SpeedDate?  Well first of all, they are not based in Southern California, however the cofounder of SpeedDate, Simon Tisminezky, is from San Diego so we figured it was relevant enough to profile how SpeedDate compares to local favorite Woome.


The Good
The two cofounders of SpeedDate are from Stanford's Graduate School of Business, and we know those guys have produced some pretty successful entrepreneurs.  Simon and Dan have picked a good business where instead of being just another metoo social networking video site, they focus specifically on connecting people to date fast.  Besides Woome there's no other major competitors in this space, so no matter what, they are in pretty good shape. They also recently received a patent for certain aspects of online speed dating, that while I doubt makes their intellectual property highly defensible, it does show that they are working with a mindset of trying to innovate in the dating industry.  Lastly, I feel pretty confident that the SpeedDate team have some good marketing tricks up their sleeve to help spur user growth, considering that they received some good coverage with their creative PR stunt hooking up bloggers for a public speed dating session (which was fairly entertaining).  

The Bad
I'm not a big fan of Woome, but I definitely like it better than SpeedDate.  Woome looks and feels cooler, and when were talking about speed dating, cool matters.  Of course, this stuff is highly subjective, but something about SpeedDate just feels less polished.  Also because Woome comparisons will abound with SpeedDate, I'm highly interested in what they think can differentiate SpeedDate from Woome, because at this point they are running second in both user traffic and general media opinion. In fact, I asked pointblank for the differentiator in my correspondence with the team, and never really received a solid answer. 

Conclusion
I wasn't a fan of web 2.0 speed dating when I reviewed Woome and I'm still not.  Either way though I recognize there's a market for it, and even if Speeddate runs second to Woome, both companies seem in good position to capitalize. 


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Thursday, January 3, 2008

YellowBot has good potential amongst the sea of local search

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Yet another entry into local search popped up last year (wow its 2008 now) without a lot of press coverage.  Santa Monica Burbank based YellowBot bills itself as "yellow pages meets del.icio.us".  And while the local search space is incredibly crowded (hence why we gave a relatively harsh review of mojopages), YellowBot has a fairly attractive implementation that makes me think they have a good chance.  


One of the things I really like about YellowBot is that they are self funded.  They've gone nearly a year building their product without taking on major investment capital and thats no easy task.  Besides that their implementation is really attractive, as its simple, sleek, and clean.  Also because their reviews are very 'tag centric' they are well positioned for good SEO.  According to Compete Metrics, they are closing in on a half a million visitors a month (and according to their own numbers they are doing over a million users a month), which means they are definitely gaining traction.  Of course, only a small portion seem to be contributing as they don't have many of their own reviews.  Most are aggregated from citysearch and other sources.   So, that begs the question, can Yellowbot get to the point where they can compete with Yelp and Citysearch/Insiderpages?   I'm not sure, because as we've said before, getting critical mass with user generated content is hard, but from the growth trends YellowBot is showing so far, they seem well on their way.

Website: http://www.yellowbot.com

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Wednesday, January 2, 2008

Cooking.com gets loan to suck less

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Today 10 year old Cooking.com (based in Santa Monica) announced that they received a $7M venture backed loan from ORIX Venture Finance. 

For those not familiar with a venture debt deal, it is sort of (in simplified terms) a cross between a bank loan and traditional venture capital round.  Anyways, one would hope that with the additional money, Cooking.com can now afford/find the time to update their site.  While Cooking.com has successfully survived the first bubble, it remains to be seen if they can get competitive in this new bubble, as user generated content sites like foodnetwork.com (seen on this graph)  are kicking old cooking.com's butt.  While Cooking.com once was at the cutting edge as the shopping portal for cooking related things, it has long been passed up by sites that have more sticky content like recipes, reviews, etc. At this point, Cooking.com is most successful with its private label and partnership agreements (sporting big names like, Starbucks, Pillsbury, and Betty Crocker).  According to Venture Beat, expanding this private label is a big part of what they are getting the funding for.  Considering that they've already received over 100M in funding, and this new round is debt financed (harder to get) its likely they are profitable, and see additional business opportunity in expanding their private label services.  Of course while this may be true, it'd be nice to see them throw some money at the core brand as well, by adding more community features to bring Cooking.com's main site into the 21st century.

 
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December 2007 | February 2008

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