Tag Archives: local
Y Combinator-Backed Local Marketplace App Yardsale Launches Nationwide
Yardsale, a mobile app to help folks sell goods to local buyers, is now available throughout the U.S., after a long, long period of testing in the San Francisco Bay Area. The latest version of the app, which hooks into Craigslist and enables users to easily list items for sale, hopes to take on other local marketplaces by reducing the friction associated with creating listings, and then dealing with flaky buyers afterward.
The Yardsale guys believe that everyone has some shit they'd like to get rid of, if only Craigslist and eBay weren't such a pain in the ass to deal with. On Craigslist, you're faced with buyers who'd rather spend time haggling than actually buying your stuff. And when you do agree on a price, you never know whether your buyer will actually show up to, you know, buy the items. As for eBay, well, you are up against a growing number of small businesses, which have cropped up to largely make individual sellers seem irrelevant. In either case, it's not a good user experience.
Eventster Brings Crowdsourced Event Discovery To iPhone & iPad
No plans yet for the weekend? Good! Here's something you should try then: Eventster is a new app for iPhone and iPad launching today which is tackling local event recommendations. The app pulls in 600,000 events per day across North America and Europe via the Zvents API (now a part of StubHub), offering activities like concerts, festivals, nightlife hotspots, theater showtimes, sports events, and more.
As you flip through the events, you can upvote and downvote them, which, in turn, helps power the app's recommendations. Other locals in your area will see those votes and can then quickly tell which events are trending. Plus, like any good recommendations app, Eventster learns which events you'll like based on your previous activity.
Capital One Acquires Mobile Savings Startup BankOns, Team Moving To Capital One Labs
San Francisco-based BankOns, an early stage mobile startup, has been acquired by Capital One and will now be incorporated into Capital One's Digital Labs. This very young company was founded in summer 2010, and launched in May 2011, with the aim of offering tools that would allow banks to reward users based on their geo-location and their purchase history.
Investors in the company include Dave McClure's 500 Startups and financial consultant Mark Greenough, who had put in during the friends and family seed round. Neither the amount of the seed round nor the deal terms were disclosed.
Investors in the company include 500 Startups and financial consultant Mark Greenough, who had put in during the friends and family seed round. The amount of the seed round nor the deal terms were disclosed.
Capital One Acquires Mobile Savings Startup BankOns, Team Moving To Capital One Labs
San Francisco-based BankOns, an early stage mobile startup, has been acquired by Capital One and will now be incorporated into Capital One's Digital Labs. This very young company was founded in summer 2010, and launched in May 2011, with the aim of offering tools that would allow banks to reward users based on their geo-location and their purchase history.
Investors in the company include Dave McClure's 500 Startups and financial consultant Mark Greenough, who had put in during the friends and family seed round. Neither the amount of the seed round nor the deal terms were disclosed.
Investors in the company include 500 Startups and financial consultant Mark Greenough, who had put in during the friends and family seed round. The amount of the seed round nor the deal terms were disclosed.
Hoppit Launches The World’s First Ambience Search Engine For Restaurants
Finding a good restaurant - even in a city you've never been to - has never been easier. Thanks to Yelp, Urbanspoon and its various brethren, a good place to eat is generally just a few clicks away. What if you want to find a restaurant with a very specific atmosphere, though? Say you're in the mood for a pizza at a relaxed place where the noise level is just right for a good conversation? Chances are, Yelp won't be much help there, but the newly redesigned Hoppit is putting these kind of searches at the core of its service. The New York-based startup describes itself as the "world's first ambience search engine for restaurants and bars."
Lightbank-Backed Social Travel Planning Service Gtrot Shifts To Local Discovery
Social travel planning service Gtrot is changing its focus and is now officially relaunching its website with a new emphasis on local discovery. Somewhat reminiscent of Foursquare's "Explore" feature, Gtrot is working to build a platform where you can discover, save and share the best restaurants, bars, clubs, arts, events and even the best local deals from services like Groupon and Gilt City.
These changes have been underway for some time, as Gtrot has been moving away from the travel vertical since as far back as last fall. But the current version of the website you see now, was soft-launched just last week.
Local Search App AroundMe Trumps Yelp’s Mobile Apps With 6M Monthly Users
Wow, AroundMe has really been flying under the radar. The location-aware mobile search app is announcing today that it's now passed the 6 million mark for monthly unique visitors. To put that in perspective, Yelp's mobile apps see 5.7 million+ monthly uniques these days. Not bad, then, considering AroundMe has a single founder, a team of four, and no outside funding.
The company is also now reporting having surpassed 1 million downloads per month, and has recently announced new partnerships with OpenTable, Booking.com for hotel reservations, and Telenav for web-based navigation.
Engineering Serendipity
I don’t know if Highlight, Glancee, Banjo, or any one of those other startups you’re now officially sick to death of hearing about are going to make it, but I know that for the first time in a long time, we’re starting to move in the right direction in terms of mobile innovation. And no, I don’t mean we need more people-stalking apps, I mean we need more passive use of our mobile phones.
Less life lived looking down means more life actually lived.
The trend that strikes me here as being important is not necessarily “ambient location” or even "people finders" - that's just all we're capable of today. The real end game is engineering serendipity.
After Ditching Auctions, Mobile Marketplace EggDrop Hits Half A Million Downloads
EggDrop, essentially a mobile app alternative to Craigslist, is starting to pick up steam. The company now boasts half a million downloads of its app on iOS and Android, with $8 million in listings from across the 50 U.S. states and the U.K. (EggDrop's top two markets).
The app originally launched last June, backed by $1 million in funding in a round led by BlueRun Ventures and SV Angel. But that first experience doesn't look much like EggDrop today. In November, the company rolled out a major update (ver. 2.0) which completely replaced the auction format found in the original with more traditional marketplace-style listings. Since then, over 5,000 items have been sold within the app, including electronics, games, furniture, and even grand pianos and wedding dresses.
SoLoMo: CityMaps Nabs $2.5M To Render Your City Social, One Block At A Time
Maps have been around for millenia, but for a significant chunk of that time, they remained static, two-dimensional forms, rendered by hand on paper. It sounds crude now, even as services like Wave have us mapping our worlds with our smartphones like explorers of old. Today, with the ridiculous amount of data available on the Web and in the cloud, maps have become something else entirely, our surroundings coming alive in wizbang, interactive 3-D displays.
Throw in the level of granularity online maps are capable of, even on mobile, and your once-enthralling lists have become boring -- bordering on analog. Google Maps is a feat in and of itself, but, again, with the wealth of data now available online about local businesses, their hours of operation, menus, websites, deals, and the ability to interconnect all of them based on location, I've been waiting for a smart, visual aggregated service like CityMaps.
It’s been a little over a year since Google started teasing something it called “Project Glass.” The futuristic, wearable computer that would