« Novell will own open source (says them) | Main | The Pilgrim's Progress by John Bunyan »
April 29, 2005
Seattle local search
Was getting my latte at Uptown Espresso this morning, and on the counter was a cute little sandwich board flyer for: GetLocal.com | Your Neighborhood Connection. Hummm. Someone in Seattle attacking local search. From the ground up. The flyer had "example" stamped all over it and the web site is noticably thin (read no listings yet). They claim to have two primary consumer services (coming). First a "fresh daily" e-mail on what is new or happening in your neighborhood. Cool, I am into that. Second is a WiFi map of free wifi spots. Also interesting, but already available at scale at other sites.
Ah, but a little hunting shows the real face behind getlocal.com. It is Mike Apgar, CEO and founder of Speakeasy.
from Whois:
Mike Apgar
2222 2nd Ave
Seattle, WA 98121
US
Phone: 206-971-5177
Fax: 612-338-7332
Now it all makes sense... Speakeasy is providing local business DSL services. Now they can have their own directory listing to drive traffic, etc. Good job Mike.
Posted by Martin at April 29, 2005 6:58 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.nwventurevoice.com/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/1893
Comments
CitySearch? Sidewalk? Seattle Weekly? Etc etc etc?
Yawn.
Dead end.
Maybe piggy back eBay and Google for light revs.
A home based hobby business, at best.
The big boys already do local. This has been done to death since the beginning, and I'd like to see one success. Beuller? Bueller?
Posted by: Rob Elam 
at April 29, 2005 8:31 PM
It's a Fine Idea. Good Angle with the 'Daily'. Search Engines were "done to death", too before Google.
The Real Money is in Pay Per Lead for all of these local businesses.
Speakeasy had better start building a PPClick/Call system (or simply license ours) because there is a lot of focused competition out there for this slice between Yahoo, MSN, Google, LiveDeal, CraigsList, etc , etc...
Shoot me an email anytime, Mike. ;-)
Posted by: Zack W Handley at April 30, 2005 7:03 AM
To Rob's comment above, if you search for a Burrito spot near Pike and Broadway all of the sites you mentioned would no doubt give equal weight to Taco Del Mar and Bimbo's. Where I think there is a market for this type of bottom up search is in a site that has real local knowledge so that in the above search you would be given Bimbo's as a local fave and Taco Del Mar as a "corporate" (although still great) alternative.
Posted by: RyanMurphy at May 1, 2005 10:40 AM
I understand the value and the intention. I just don't believe there are enough Bimbos around to build a buisness (of any size) based on pay per lead in local, at least when competing against the existing large players. Not saying I wouldn't use the service ;)
Posted by: Rob Elam at May 1, 2005 2:11 PM
Got some clarification. this is a separate company from Speakeasy. Here is the reply from Holli, the founder:
Get Local is a separate company, comprised largely from the collective experience of Speakeasy founders. Mike Apgar wrote the business plan, but his day to day involvement is almost nil as he's still full-time at Speakeasy.
Cheers,
Holli
Posted by: ministeroforder at May 2, 2005 9:50 AM
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)