Yeah, If you’ve been following ITV’s corporate strategy, then you’ll notice, they’ve declared, as many other old media, the internet is the only stream of growth.

If you ring them they’re already changing the branding/parent-attachment, but whether actively or not, that business is one of the few subsidiaries with substantial avenues for growth.

And don’t forget the cocoon-like potential of Friends-Reunited.

Good luck to them all, but this area requires a lot of foot-soldiers if you want to create barriers-to-entry, to create some sort of tipping-point, but if google/kelkoo can just scrape the web, and any business can set up their own bespoke site with out needing to pay extra to the specialists, that market could go just as easily as the wider web.

Mr. ozman, what’s your email address.

Yours kindly,

Shakir Razak

There are a few specific issues that I would like to address from the thread above:

- Balderton actually made their £7m investment in TouchLocal in September 2006.

- The company has ‘grown up’ substantially over the last two years, and we are now a highly professional organisation with an experienced management team and over 100 employees.

- Like all social networking companies, we encourage our staff to be early adopters and to review as many businesses as possible, but we have never seen this as a means to inflate the number of reviews we have. We are currently receiving around 5,000 reviews a month from consumers across the UK, and this number is growing month on month.

- We are 100% committed to make touchlocal.com the UK’s most user-friendly business finder, and building a large community of reviewers and recommenders to make looking for a relevant, recommended local businesses as easy as possible.

We are very proud of the new site, and whilst the work is never finished, initial reaction has been very positive to the improvements to the business finder and the new practical social networking aspect (although Alistair may be relieved to hear that we have not invested more than a few percentage point of our investment on the entire site redevelopment!).

I hope that helps to clarify a few points for contributors to the discussion. Thanks for your interest in TouchLocal, and please feel free to contact me directly if you would like to discuss anything further in person.

Tamer Ozmen
CEO

Qype & TrustedPlaces have much better approaches, and alexa would suggest that it’s paying off for Qype at least.

Shakir – I’ve just had a look over at Scoot/ITV Local and it’s simply a business listing site at the moment. Do they plan on building a community site?

People have forgotten about the potential of Scoot/ITV-Local to push into this space with the potential force thay have.

Yours kindly,

Shakir razak

On the plumber discussion:
We at Qype have seen that predictably the information on plumbers develops more slowly on Qype than the lifestyle areas that people use more often and which form of their identity.

But from our experience in Germany, we see that plumbers are in fact being added on by the users after a while.

I slightly disagree with the view that the yellow pages can come up with an easy editorial solution. A community is just more powerful.

But I do enjoy this kind of discussion.

Stephan Uhrenbacher, CEO Qype

exiva.com
share your life, treasure the privacy

Facebook, obviously, still very much has a place in the market (almost 10 million UK users don’t lie!); but we feel there is a space in the market for a website that brings people together at the local level through recommendations and in-depth information on local business. It’s our view that our “Circles” social networking engine has cracked this, as people put great value on the knowledge of the people they know especially at the local level .

All in all, we are extremely happy with the re-launch and I really hope everyone gives the site a try.

Phil Geraghty – Product Director – Touchlocal.com

In 2006 we saw the DVD rental industry consolidate and maybe later this year we will also see the consolidation in the online home market – nestoria, dothome, zoomf, rightmove, primelocation and propertyfinder etc. and maybe even further in Europe with properazzi.

As reported by the Burnley Citizen:

http://www.burnleycitizen.co.uk/display.var.1012413.0.workforce_is_to_grow_fourfold.php

I don’t really like Alexa (and I know the graph does represent touchmanchester, touchleeds etc.) but wouldn’t you say the smaller fish have pretty much made up the ground in just 6 months?

I personally use Welovelocal to review restaurants, cafes, bars and clubs. The site itself is beautifully done – as usual it’s just that “feeling” that gets me to use it.

I’ve always seen touchlocal, and most of the UK local-service sites, as little more than SEO scams. The amount of times you search for “recruitment agency near islington” and get an adsense-filled, table-based, generic site with no real meat amounts to the norm, in my experience.