Posts Tagged ‘recommendation’

The next generation of local search engines is here, and it looks a little bit like Netflix. We recently met up with founder, president and general manager Gadi Shamia (pictured right) and VP of marketing Ryan Kuder (pictured left) to talk about Bizzy, ReachLocal‘s personalized local business recommendation engine that launched this morning in San Francisco.

Shamia said there are three ways to discover a business: find what you already know you want in the yellow pages or Google, let the critics decide for you on Zagat or Yelp, or do it the old-fashioned way and ask around. Shamia feels that all three options are missing one thing: that none of these recommendations are personalized. One person’s one-star dive is another person’s five-star hidden gem, and just because two people are friends, doesn’t mean that they like all the same things.

Kuder told mbStartups that he and Shamia have vastly different taste in restaurants. “He eats rabbit food,” he said. “I’m more steaks and martinis.”

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Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Bandsintown has come a long way. What was once a useful widget for tracking the tour dates of your favorite musicians has evolved into a socially integrated network and recommendation service. The site has undergone a complete redesign, the first since its 2007 launch. With a reported 30,000 registered members, Bandsintown has a healthy user base but is clearly seeking growth and increased usability, based on its new features and relaunch.

There are two areas of improvement with the redesign, the first of which is the social integration of Bandsintown with other sites including Twitter. Bandintown is leveraging Twitter to help users gain a remote concert experience.
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