Cityvoter.com, a user-generated city guide that competes with services like AOL’s City Guide, and countless others, announced that it closed $2.6 million in Series B funding.
The round was led by Allen & Company and Dace Ventures and Curt Viebranz, former CEO of Tacoda, as well as Bradley Wechsler, co-CEO of IMAX, joined the company’s advisory board.
CityVoter features business profiles, user-created guides, and recommendations on more than 55 cities and recently released a geo-targeting feature to let users find places to eat, drink, and visit beyond the pre-defined metro areas. Most importantly, though, CityVoter has teamed up with Belo, FOX, Gazette Communications, and others to provide its services on their respective sites in an attempt to increase localized user engagement.
horrible name, makes you think its a local elections website
What valuation did they get? The website is very nice, I wish you could just browse the map.
another one? recommendation site? at least the funds are in motion and arent just sittin in someones pocket doing nothing. i aree with alex. horrible name. if one of these recomend sites just had a good domain name maybe we would have a stand out leader. MyCity.com or some other “natural language location” would be cool. Spend the money and buy a good domain or get lost in the bunch. slogan hurts too (own your city). how does recommendations and owning a city mix. Elect you city makes more sense. logo looks like a upside down star with one of its lights out.
congrats on the loan.
RatingLocator.com
I agree with Alex. You see the name and ask, “what does this have to do with local elections?” From an educator’s perspective, I’m always wondering how something like this could be incorporated into classrooms. Any suggestions?
Its nice to finally see the local space taking off, a lot of apps are starting to pop up and depending on how you section of the industry in may seem a bit of a crowded space. But I’ve also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be a lot of VC money invested in the space either. I don’t really have any sort of stats to back this up, just a feeling I have.
What does this offer that Yelp.com does not?
I find the comments on Yelp to be expansive and helpful, whilst the ones on CityVoter.com (stupid name) to be too brief to be useful.
Yelp has a better color scheme as I find it “warmer and friendlier”.
I like some of the features, but another review site?! I think the review part is too easily manipulated. It’s been proven that when someone has a bad experience they are way more likely to express that then someone who had a great one. jmo
Dan
The wow factor is nowhere to be seen on this one. Actually, i take that back, the wow factor is all the cash being pumped into it, when a site like eventorb .com has one developer behind it and $10k in investment money.
i think it’s a cool concept..i would have to try it out but yeak,i like the idea so far
hey,jack.I don’t know if you can say that there is no “wow factor”…i like the site..it is a great concept i think..but i visited that site eventorb.com,and i can’t believe that only one developer is behind it. Really amazing!
Just one more venture where the “city guide” concept of monetizing is a flawed business model because it presents a false value proposition to the local business -Meaning these sites have very limited users (local consumers). It’s about eyeballs people! What local business cares about their rating and reviews if the site doesn’t deliver a reasonable amount of traffic? City Voter is a terrible search engine – a user only gets the local businesses that have been sold a sponsorship by the third party reseller, the local radio, TV station or print publication. I typed in “office furniture” and got florists because the local media company hasn’t sold any office furniture businesses into the local guide. You only get one chance in this world of Internet users.
CityVoter is just one more player behind the 100’s in the long tail of local search – the tail begins after the 95% factor of all searches that originate on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. With the exception of “Yelp”, a foodie review site, Cityvoter is just another Kudzu (talk about a terrible name!)