Canpages, a Canadian local search firm, is acquiring GigPark, a nifty social recommendations platform that enables users to find and praise local businesses and service providers together with their friends.
The deal terms were not disclosed so it’s safe to say it likely concerns a fairly small acquisition, although we should note GigPark was bootstrapped by a mere $200k from its two co-founders Noah Godfrey and Pema Hegan.
Canpages intends to integrate user recommendations into its online local search platform, and add a social media layer to its online and mobile products, so it was probably cheaper for them to buy the Toronto-based company outright than to develop all that in-house.
Yesterday at the Mesh conference in Toronto I met Noah Godfrey, one of the founders of GigPark. A social recommendation Website that launched last February, the site recently pushed out a major redesign. It’s like Yelp, but only with recommendations from people you know.
The point of GigPark is to collect and share recommendations of local services with your friends. You import your contact list from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Outlook, or Hotmail. Or add it as a Facebook application. Then you can start asking questions. Does anyone know a good doctor, lawyer, plumber? What’s the best Thai restaurant in town? And you can start giving your own recommendations. All of these questions and answers appears as a consolidated feed from you, your friends, and the friends of your friends.
It only works with friends who have joined GigPark or added the Facebook app, but you can make your page public to share it with friends who are not members. Here’s Godfrey’s public page.
The site also lets you search for specific services, like restaurants or dog walker. And you can see who recommended what.
For each recommendation there is a page with the original recommendation and contact information. Comments can be made on any recommendation, and they can be added to your favorites as well. Most of the features work within Facebook as well. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather get recommendations from people I know or who I can ask about than from anonymous strangers.
GigPark has been bootsrapped so far with $200,000 from Godfrey and his co-founder Pema Hegan. It competes with Trusted Opinion, which has raised $3.6 million.
