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The holiday season is officially in full swing, and Santa is prepping for his big night by offering phone calls to anyone who may need a little extra motivation to stay good through the end of the year (or who would just love to hear from the big man himself). To request a call, visit ChristmasDialer.com, where you’ll be able to choose from three possible voice greetings that can be directed towards any phone number.
The first call is free, while subsequent requests cost around a dollar each (depending on how many you buy at a time). Paid calls can also be made to international numbers, and can be scheduled to go out at a specified time. The site is based on the technology behind PrankDialer, and could probably be recreated fairly easily using Twilio, an API for phones that we covered last week.
Also be sure to check out The Santa Tracker on Christmas, where you’ll be able to watch him make his way around the globe in real time.
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I like StumbleUpon, the website recommendation engine that lets me click a button whenever I’d like to view a new, potentially interesting website. But for all the hours it has helped me waste, I wouldn’t go as far as to call it useful - pages that get recommended are rarely related to each other beyond a general category, so there’s never any logical train of thought.
San Francisco-based startup BuzzBox is looking to add some logic to the art of ’stumbling’ with its new Firefox plugin, Fast Forward. The service generates site recommendations based not only on their popularity, but also by the order in which they were viewed. For example, when I clicked the ‘Fast Forward’ button while reading about Twitter users reporting on the terror attacks in India, the service directed me towards the latest CNN coverage on today’s atrocities, as this was the page most frequently visited after reading the TechCrunch article.
To accomplish this feat, Fast Foward records and analyzes the anonymized browsing habits of its users. CTO Mike Prince assures me that all data is totally anonymous and that the service ignores any secure browsing (like banking or Email), but there are still a few possible issues. For one, users may be inadvertently directed to staging pages that are typically obfuscated (I actually managed to land on a BuzzBox alpha page by hitting Fast Forward from its homepage). Prince acknowledges that there are still some issues, explaining that it is still in an experimental stage. And if you do frequent sensitive sites, it’s easy to turn off tracking entirely.
While the plugin is for Firefox only at the moment, the company plans to have an Internet Explorer version available in the next few months. For now BuzzBox isn’t doing anything to monetize Fast Foward, but in the future the plugin may integrate unintrusive overlays at the top of some sites with small ads (Prince emphasizes that the plugin won’t be annoying).
I like Fast Forward - in my testing it was usually easy to tell why certain pages were being recommended, and while it may not always be as entertaining as StumbleUpon (because the recommendations are less varied), I find it much more useful. That said, the service will need to seriously ramp up its privacy settings, otherwise paranoia may keep its userbase small.
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The German startup community has been notorious for blatant clones of popular sites developed elsewhere (my personal favorite is Freundefeed). One startup that is sometimes associated with this trend (perhaps unjustly) is Qype, a Yelp-like site for reviews that has established a strong presence throughout Europe. CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher says that he wasn’t aware of Yelp’s existence when he launched Qype, but at this point it doesn’t really matter - Qype is on fire, and is on its way to becoming the dominant local review site in a number of countries, including England, France, and Germany.
Uhrenbacher says that Qype sees 6.3 million monthly unique visitors across The UK, France, Spain, and Germany (where the site was originally founded and receives around half its traffic). The site also recently launched a localized version for Brazil. But while Qype is multilingual, it treats each localized version as its own site - you’ll never run across a review in French if you’ve specified your preferred language as English.
So does Qype have any plans for coming to the US after its European (and more recently, South American) expansions? Uhrenbacher says that in order to take on Yelp the site would need to bring something different to the table, which could possibly be its multi-lingual capabilities. He also says that Qype is less city-centric than Yelp (I’m not entirely sure what he means by that - I’ve always found Yelp to work well in smaller towns). But for now, he says there are many more uncontested markets to expand to, so we probably won’t be seeing Qype on US shores for some time, if ever.
By mid December the site plans to launch its geo-location enabled iPhone application, which will allow users to immediately detect what restaurants and shops are nearby and view recommendations on them. The site closed an €8 million round in September, and has raised €13m to date.
Qype may be the the site to beat in Europe, but it is by no means the only competitor in that space (others major players include Trusted Places, Tipped and TouchLocal in the UK). And there’s always Yelp, which may have some international aspirations of its own. That said, Qype seems to be on a roll - after making some key talent acquisitions earlier this year, some European rivals were driven to ask the press for advice, which is rarely a good sign.
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