Yelp, a popular business review site that covers everything from food to entertainment to home repair services to real estate brokerages, with virtually all critiques coming straight from consumers’ mouths, has launched a new suite of tools for local business owners, called, appropriately enough, Yelp for Business Owners. The new section of the website is [...]

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Yesterday Henry Blodget unveiled the new SAI 25 which values the top 25 startups. At the top of the list was Facebook, bringing in a valuation of $9 billion. Didn’t Microsoft value Facebook at $15 billion though? Well yes but as most people know, Microsoft over-valued Facebook. So how about the other Silicon Valley darling, [...]

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One of the measures of success for a tech website or blog is getting TechCrunched, Dugg or ‘slashdotted‘ — the sudden surge of visitors that comes as a result of being highlighted by one of these big-traffic sites, often crashing the target site (it happened to one of my sites once). But such [...]

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eBay has filed a lawsuit against Craigslist, alleging that the classifieds giant has diluted the online auctioneer’s stake in the company. eBay purchased 28.4% of Craigslist in 2004, but according to the report from Reuters, Craigslist has diluted that stake by more than 10% in an effort to lower eBay’s influence.

Craigslist was recently reported to [...]

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Remember when customer service meant service provided for you? By someone else?

More and more, customer service means you get to serve yourself.

Technically, that makes it self-service. But in marketing parlance, self-service is actually a form of customer service, wherein the store—or the airline or the hotel—installs a cool gadget that lets you do the work [...]

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Rupert Murdoch’s effort to turn his $580 million MySpace purchase into an advertising powerhouse has turned News Corp. into a toxic stock.Analyst Michael Nathanson at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. cut his price estimate on New York-based News Corp., the media company Murdoch controls, by 13 percent last week to $21, and UBS AG’s Michael [...]

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Commuto is a new player in the social swapping space that already includes sites such as YouSwap, but they are looking to make it easier for you to trade what you don’t want anymore for the items you do.

Registration for this new site is a snap, and you are immediately greeted by a page of [...]

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Google has released an updated developer sandbox for iGoogle, the company’s personal startpage service. The key new feature is support for OpenSocial APIs, which means that activities from Google Gadgets can be posted to activity streams on OpenSocial supporting networks. Jessica Ewing, Product Manager for iGoogle, offered the example of playing a game of pacman [...]

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Yesterday Om Malik discussed a conversation he had with Sarik Weber who’s company had developed a free SMS application on Facebook. Om as well as Sarik were surprised with the relatively low success of the application. Additionally, Om noted that the top SMS application on Facebook were only receiving around 500 active daily users. A [...]

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A development born from Google Experimental has crept its way somewhat silently into the company’s full-fledged Maps utility, according to Ionut Alex Chitu of the Google Operating System blog. Now found in the ‘show search options’ menu, an option to restrict searches to “Mapped Web pages” offers users [...]

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