Google, Zagat And Content

Image via CrunchBaseGoogle was not, is not a content company. Yahoo yes, AOL yes, but not Google. So I was a little surprised that Google went ahead and bought Zagat. But then Google pays entities like the Associated Press to get news stories directly on to the Google News platform. That's getting into content.

Goes on to show how unformed the mobile space is. The mobile space, the local space. Marissa Mayer might not have been able to buy GroupOn, but she sure did buy Zagat, did she not?

I was surprised and still don't fully understand, but that is not to say it is not a good move. And the price tag - undisclosed, I believe - is not outrageous.
Image via Wikipedia

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Buzzd

Image via CrunchBase

CrunchBase: Buzzd real-time social city guide for your mobile device...... Employees 9 .... Founded 11/07 ..... Delivers up-to-the-minute reviews and ratings from friends, buzzd members, and other real-time content from twitter, gowalla, foursquare, loopt, brightkite, etc. ...... Aggregates static content feeds from Zagat, Flavorpill, Citysearch, Metromix, Upcoming, and many more ..... Real-time activity drives users to view and act upon local inventory ..... featured by Apple, BlackBerry & Android, as high as #2 top overall app for BlackBerry and #64 top free app for Apple, featured free app for Android on Verizon VCAST. .... received $3.2M in Series A funding. (10/29/08)
Buzzd - Wikipedia buzzd was founded by Nihal Mehta and Deepen Shah from ipsh!, one of the world’s first mobile marketing agencies in the U.S. which was acquired by Omnicom Group in 2005.
VentureBeat: Buzzd ward-winning social city guide
Buzzd Brings Location-Based Guides to the BlackBerry One of the first seeds sowed by the BlackBerry Partners Fund, a venture capital fund which doles out investments to start-ups building applications for mobile phones, has sprouted. ...... But it wasn’t easy to get this far. Nihal Mehta and Deepen Shah, company co-founders, said that to get Buzzd to offer speedy and reliable results, they spent a year building a comprehensive database of sites. The service triangulates the location of a customer using cellular tower locations and GPS coordinates and then associates that data with the precise location of the sites. ....... Buzzd’s database has 500,000 cellular points within its network ...... Buzzd has more than two million restaurants, bars and shops listed in its database, largely from content partners like TimeOut, FlavorPill and MyOpenBar. ....... The BlackBerry application will also allow members to snap photos — say, of a cocktail or dish, or a celebrity sighting — ....... the Web site gets one million monthly unique visitors and was “in the six digits for active users on a monthly basis.” ........ The two men, who started the company in 2007, are in the early stages of developing a version of Buzzd for the iPhone, which they say will be released this summer.
X-conomy: Buzzd Blackberry Partners Fund Greycroft Partners Monitor Ventures Qualcomm Ventures

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