-Mark Britton, CEO and President, Avvo
-Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com
-Matt Maloney, Cofounder and CEO, GrubHub
-Carey Ransom, CEO, Real Practice

Collectively, these four have raised the princely sum of about $140 million in private funding.

The first panelist was Pete Flint, CEO, Trulia.com. Trulia, of course, is a major real estate vertical. (Trulia added rentals to its real estate listings about 18 months ago.) It claims the largest user-generated community in the real estate industry.

Trulia has attempted to push the envelope on leveraging social services. It runs a large real estate Q&A on its site, covering the real estate transaction process, information and commentary on neighborhoods, etc.). Flint said the crash in the housing market has actually helped the business, because it has made brokers more interested in consumer preferences and consumer-generated commentary.

Next was Matt Maloney, cofounder and CEO, GrubHub. GrubHub is where the consumer goes for dine out, either take-out or delivery. So GrubHub quite a bit different from other restaurant/food sites that focus on reservations.

GrubHub handles almost 15,000 restaurants nationally. Restaurants pay GrubHub a commission in the vicinity of 15 percent of each order. About 40 percent of its traffic is from mobile users. Maloney pointed out that the pay-for-performance model worked with its restaurant clients, whereas paid advertising did not.

The third panelist was Mark Britton, CEO and president of Avvo, the legal and professional services directory website. Avvo became the largest consumer-oriented legal website in just three years, and Britton attributes a lot of that success to the ways it has harnessed social media. (Britton pointed out that Avvo is now four times the size of Martindale-Hubbell online.)

Avvo’s Q&A forum handles 50,000 questions and answers monthly. Although its business model includes a subscription-based pro model, advertising is a big (primary?) source of its revenues. Britten said Avvo wanted to use a CPC revenue model, but its lawyer clients said it had a strong preference for a fixed-cost pricing model.

Carey Ransom, CEO of Real Practice, talked about how his company aggregates responses and leads from a variety of ad campaigns, to Real Practice’s centralized platform. The platform supports centralized lead management, real-time lead notifications and cross-campaign performance comparisons. Real Practice started by serving only lawyers, but has since expanded to other professions. They key to its success is its ability to tailor its mechanisms (such as the lead processing pipeline) to specific professions and verticals, unlike more generic lead gen sites.

To complete the arc of this session, Ransom mentioned that Real Practice is also integrated in with Avvo profiles, in a classic example of symbiosis between players who could otherwise be, arguably, competitors.

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Avvo, the Seattle-based vertical site that launched its lawyer ratings service in 2007, has now added doctor ratings, using the proceeds, in part, from a $10 million raise it did in March. In launching a doctors site, it goes head to head against Angie’s List, Everydayhealth.com and dozens of others that view doctor ratings and other medical practitioner information as uncharted territory.

Avvo Doctors, which works off a common platform with Lawyers, is launching with numerical ratings and profiles for 800,000 doctors in all 50 states, or 90 percent of all U.S. doctors. It also includes medical misconduct information for roughly 50 percent of doctors — a percentage it hopes to boost to 90 percent by Q1 2011 as state medical boards improve their reporting systems.

The site include 400 questions and answers from certified doctors. It expects the Q&A forum to grow at a faster rate than its legal counterpart, which receives more than 50,000 contributions per month.

Avvo has also put together a medical advisory board that includes the former president of the American Medical Association, a chief surgeon at the University of Washington, and two doctors who run their own elective clinics on the East and West coasts.

“In the online marketing world, doctors look a lot like lawyers did before Avvo arrived,” notes CEO and Founder Mark Britton on the company blog. “Consumers are lost when trying to find a doctor, let alone trying to understand the doctor’s background and reputation. Few doctors understand the art or science of marketing – especially online marketing. Doctors still spend over $500 million dollars annually in the Yellow Pages (yes, the yellow pages).”

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Angie’s List, the premium ratings and review service for home and medical services, has announced that it has raised $22.5 Million from institutional investors as it prepares for an IPO within 18 months. Investors in this round include some public funds managers, including Wasatch Funds.   The company previously raised $48 million, making for a grand total of $70.5 million raised. Battery Ventures remains the lead investor.

The Indianapolis-based service charges members anywhere from $10 to $67 per year for access to its ratings and reviews. The service reports over one million members, which probably translates into at least half a million paid and trial accounts, since there are typically two members per  account.

Current revenues are not disclosed. But in 2008, roughly half of Angie’s List’s $50 million  in revenues had come from  membership and set up fees. The other half had come from advertising from reviewed companies that are highly rated (“B” and above) as well as national companies, such as appliance makers and retailers. Advertising can be found on the website as well as in a printed, monthly magazine that is well read by members.

Angie’s List has grown its mission considerably in the past couple of years. It has raised its profile with  aggressive television, radio and print advertising, and added medical reviews, which it has intended to eventually break out as a separate, paid service. It has also added national services, for categories such as custom car restoration – it takes its Indianapolis roots seriously– and recently unveiled The Angie’s  List Big Deal, a group buying effort that is now in 30 local markets and will be in 50+ markets by year end.

The big question marks for Angie’s List are whether it can simultaneously sustain its growth in the face of free competitors, such as Yelp, ServiceMagic and others; get beyond its older, home owner demographic; successfully extend its service to the new categories, and others; and maintain its friendly, home-spun “community” image.

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Yelp has added to its international portfolio, following up on its May launch in France with a launch in Germany. Berlin and Munich are Yelp’s first German markets. Fifteen additional German markets have been seeded with “scout” reviews, but won’t be fully turned on for a bit.

These markets include Bielefeld, Bonn, Bremen, Dortmund, Dresden, Duisburg, Dusseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Hanover, Koln, Leipzig, Nuremberg and Stuttgart. German versions of Yelp for iPhone and Yelp for Business Owners will also be available in the near future. Yelp had previously launched Yelp UK in January 2009 and Yelp Ireland in June 2009.

The German and French services are Yelp’s first non-English language markets. While English speakers may see the interface in English, the reviews are all in native language and at this point, there is no translation of reviews by non-German and French speakers (i.e., American tourists).

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Canon and Yell settled on acquiring the U.K. review site Trusted Places in a deal announced today.

Trusted Places is a U.K.-based start-up where consumers can share their opinions on merchants across the spectrum of local categories. The site has roughly 1 million monthly uniques and has been operating for about four years, competing with the likes of Qype and Yelp.

Canon told us yesterday that one of the key elements of the deal was Trusted Places’ intellectual property, its system for managing large volumes of reviews and, critically, stimulating review behavior.

The acquisition, completed a few weeks ago, will lead to the consolidation of Trusted Places into a new Yell site, which will operate as a review site, while the reviews will also be appended to merchant listings on Yell.com.

Canon said one of the key opportunities from the deal will be in encouraging Yell’s roughly 400,000 U.K. advertisers to stimulate review activity. Canon says U.K. merchants are increasingly aware of the “review ecosystem” and the impact it has on their visibility and reputation.

Canon says the Trusted Places leadership team will join Yell. He also noted that Yell’s integration of Trusted Places will eventually be exported to Yell’s U.S. and Spanish operations.

On a related front, Canon told us that Yell has opened a new Yell Labs facility in Central London that will eventually house up to 75 developers, programmers, digital sales specialists and others focused on developing and trialing new digital products.

Canon says a key side benefit of the new facility will be in recruiting top level new media talent to the company. Yell’s main offices are in Reading, a small city outside London with little cache. A Central London location has a much higher “cool” factor, not a small element in recruiting.

The Trusted Places announcement follows a recent substantial upgrade to the Yell.com Web site, which we posted on last week. The new version includes an elaborate 3-D mapping platform, a street view feature, a new video channel and the ability to “shortlist” favorite places and share the list with friends via e-mail, Facebook or Twitter.

The post Yell Acquires Trusted Places, Opens Lab appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Real estate and rental agents get into big trouble if they mouth off about a neighborhood’s quality-of-life issues. The most they can do is point to Web sites that provide some general stats (i.e., school info, crime stats and market trends).

Now Trulia is getting deeper, a la user-generated content. Three weeks ago, it launched ratings on 12, well-researched quality-of-life issues. Ratings are provided on a one- to five-star basis, and include safety; pet-friendliness; walkability; restaurants & shopping; parks & recreation; schools; traffic; parking; entertainment & nightlife; public transportation; community involvement; and cleanliness. Users may submit their ratings via mobile or Internet. So far, more than 140,000 ratings have come in.

Today, Trulia added reviews as well. The site is asking users to “tell us about the surrounding area, be it the neighborhood, sub-neighborhood or actual block. The more local your knowledge, the more helpful it will be to another person! Do you live on the coolest block in your city? Tell us about it. Does your neighborhood have the best restaurants and stores? We want to know.” Over time, the site hopes to showcase its aggregated local area ratings, and reviews for every neighborhood and every block.

Think about your own neighborhood. Would you have been able to use something like this? I would have. After seven years, I have learned that my neighborhood is very safe, relatively pet-friendly (except for the lurking coyotes), and has excellent shopping and restaurants that are nearby but require a car to get to. Other than dining, it has no nightlife. It has good schools through middle school, but the high school is in the tougher, adjacent town. It has very good parking, lots of tot lots, two pools and weekly block parties for young children but no other community involvement. It is also quite clean.

It might not be the neighborhood for everyone. Most of this would have been picked up by Trulia’s rating system, which has been expertly thought out by Trulia’s research team.

The post Trulia Asks: What Do You Think of This Neighborhood? appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Redbeacon, one of the new breed of social/local leads providers for SMBs, said it is now available throughout the entire Bay Area and teaming up with BigTent, a mega-moms network in the Bay Area with more than 100 local cells. BigTent will receive a revenue share carved from Redbeacon’s 10 percent commission.

The deal between BigTent and Redbeacon positions the company not only against Yellow Pages and other newbreed leads providers (i.e.m ServiceMagic, AlikeList, HelpHive, ThumbTack and Sears’ ServiceLive) but also against other sites that specifically tailor to moms (and women generally). These include sites such as Angie’s List and Center’d. It plays on the theory that some women are intimidated by home and trade professionals and may be more likely to seek out a social network for advice and recommendations.

For BigTent, the partnership marks the first time it has partnered with an organization to promote local businesses. It had previously worked deals with a number of national brands.

The BigTent news caps off a campaign to land associations and other organizations as partners. The results of the effort means that the site now boasts listings of 16,000 service pros with the badges of their organizations — a major trust factor. One of the key prizes has been the local branch of the Better Business Bureau, which previously hadn’t loaned out its list.

In other site developments, Redbeacon, which won the top prize as best new idea at TechCrunch 50 six months ago, is adding “Friendly Advice.” The feature lets friends comment on job bids (and the bidders). This complements the company’s matching engine, and reviews and ratings found on other parts of the site — including both positive and negative reviews.

“We’re crowd-sourcing recommendations and sharing,” says CEO Ethan Anderson. One added benefit is the viral element and the added exposure for Redbeacon: 500 views may become 2,500, he says.

Anderson notes that the company has been in a constant state of “iteration” since launching, and will only begin the process of raising money when it is satisfied with the end product. So far, the site has added several features, such as enabling private communications between consumers and providers in the middle of a bid and allowing providers to additional information upon request. “Consumers need lots of information to make a decision,” he says. The site has also syndicated reviews from Yelp, Google and Yahoo to complement its own.

One milestone reached by the site is that it can now successfully furnish a quote for every job that is bid. In fact, it had more than 1,000 service providers almost immediately after launch, and continues to rapidly grow its base. “We don’t have a chicken or egg problem,” says Anderson. “Signing up (service providers) has been easy.”

Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson will join AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi and Reply.com COO Sean Fox on the “SMB Marketplaces” panel at Marketplaces 2010. ServiceMagic CEO Craig Smith is a keynoter at the conference.

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AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)

The site’s main purpose is to zero in on nontraditional categories that aren’t really met by Yellow Pages (such as “romantic hotels”). While no advertising is currently being sold, it will be sold in the future. There is currently no plan to integrate with the reviews that users provide Yellowpages.com, or its new prototype, YP.com. Buzz.com users will have a different intent in mind.

The beta hooks in with Facebook Connect, and will roll out over several weeks after initially being limited to invites only. Project leader Charlie Hornberger notes that Buzz will eventually also be enabled for Twitter, instant messaging platforms, Q&A sites (such as Answers.com), and other social networks as well. “Social search is the future, but not in 2010” he says. As with AlikeList, which we also wrote about this week, the positive nature of a recommendations-only site represents “extremely qualified leads.”

Hornberger notes that the user interface remains a work in progress for the project team, which has less than two-dozen people. Initially, for instance, the site was going to limit its big red heart for favorites to a single choice. It quickly found out that people want to have multiple favorites. The site also currently has a list of favorites for each user. But in the future, that list might take more creative forms, such as tag clouds.

The site will also eventually feature “best recommenders.” Future versions may also have some aspects in sentimental analysis and reputation and presence management. AT&T is investing in these areas. But Buzz.com is actually a fairly simple idea. It just needs strong execution. “You don’t need a Ph.D.” for it, says Hornberger. Current plans are to market it virally, with some advertising on social media likely as well.

AT&Ti Executive Director Greg Isaacs is a featured speaker on the New Directories Panel at Marketplaces 2010, along with execs from Local Matters, SuperMedia and MerchantCircle. r

The post AT&Ti’s Buzz.com Now in Beta appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

AT&T Interactive has put up a beta version of its new Buzz.com site dedicated to eliciting positive social recommendations and answers to questions from friends, friends of friends and throughout the Buzz site (which, unfortunately, may get confused with Google Buzz, which was developed after AT&T had announced plans for Buzz.com.)

The site’s main purpose is to zero in on nontraditional categories that aren’t really met by Yellow Pages (such as “romantic hotels”). While no advertising is currently being sold, it will be sold in the future. There is currently no plan to integrate with the reviews that users provide Yellowpages.com, or its new prototype, YP.com. Buzz.com users will have a different intent in mind.

The beta hooks in with Facebook Connect, and will roll out over several weeks after initially being limited to invites only. Project leader Charlie Hornberger notes that Buzz will eventually also be enabled for Twitter, instant messaging platforms, Q&A sites (such as Answers.com), and other social networks as well. “Social search is the future, but not in 2010” he says. As with AlikeList, which we also wrote about this week, the positive nature of a recommendations-only site represents “extremely qualified leads.”

Hornberger notes that the user interface remains a work in progress for the project team, which has less than two-dozen people. Initially, for instance, the site was going to limit its big red heart for favorites to a single choice. It quickly found out that people want to have multiple favorites. The site also currently has a list of favorites for each user. But in the future, that list might take more creative forms, such as tag clouds.

The site will also eventually feature “best recommenders.” Future versions may also have some aspects in sentimental analysis and reputation and presence management. AT&T is investing in these areas. But Buzz.com is actually a fairly simple idea. It just needs strong execution. “You don’t need a Ph.D.” for it, says Hornberger. Current plans are to market it virally, with some advertising on social media likely as well.

AT&Ti Executive Director Greg Isaacs is a featured speaker on the New Directories Panel at Marketplaces 2010, along with execs from Local Matters, SuperMedia and MerchantCircle. r

The post AT&Ti’s Buzz.com Now in Beta appeared first on BIA/Kelsey - Local Media Watch.

Self-serve ads will bring the SMB masses to the Web. But they haven’t made much of a dent in SMB advertising at this point. That hasn’t stopped a rush of new self-serve products coming out, several married to social media features. The latest is “minute ads” from AlikeList, one of the new crop of social/directory plays that also includes Redbeacon, Thumbtack, HelpHive, PriceLocal, Center’d and many others.

AlikeList’s Minute Ads allow business owners to create and publish offers on the fly, and change the offers as often as they like. They can be sent out to consumers that specifically request recommendations for a specific type of provider (i.e., plumber).

The Minute Ads are part of Alikelist’s “Business Central” platform, which is being priced at $19.99 a month. Included in the subscription is a “PromoSite,” along with presence and reputation management capabilities that enable customers to see how many people have “liked” or “want to try” their business, or who have clicked to their Web site or phone number.

CEO Jim Delli Santi believes that ALikeList’s like-only platform is highly differentiated from simple reviews and ratings sites (i.e., Yelp and Citysearch). “Review sites are more like media companies broadcasting review content generated from consumers,” says Delli Santi.

In theory, the site also does away with the “volume” problem of not enough reviews on a social site by letting users see “likes” from their friends, friends of friends, and then also from all over the Web.

By focusing only on “likes,” it also skims off the negative reviews. That obviously has pros and cons. I tend to like negative reviews because they provide nuance and important warning signs and make for entertaining reading. But negative reviews may also be the work of consumer vigilantes, and they don’t necessarily help people quickly find a business that they want to use.

AlikeList CEO Jim Delli Santi is speaking at Marketplaces 2010 on a hot session with Redbeacon CEO Ethan Anderson and Reply.com COO Sean Fox.

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