Newsonomics: Buying Yelp — and Making It the Next Core of the Local News and Information business

Yelp’s for sale, and the news has generated the usual, now-tiresome lists of potential buyers: Google, Amazon, Apple, Yahoo, Facebook. It’s like all the money in the business world slid off one end of the table and sluiced down to Silicon Valley. Forget the old spend-a-week-without-the-Internet ...

Read More

The Newsonomics of Commercial Crowdsourcing

One big lesson here for everyone to get their heads around. This is commercial crowdsourcing. Why outsource the collection, organization and checking of “directory data,” as numerous Yellow Pages companies have done over time, when you can have the crowd do it — for free. It’s using the web, as ...

Read More

Honolulu Civil Beat: Where’s the Marketplace?

In my community, I'd have great local news reporting, great community discussion -- and great Yelp-like functionality, great Open Table-like functionality, great-Angie's List like-functionality, hey, great eBay-like functionality (aka The New Classifieds!). Maybe, that's a wrinkle up Civic ...

Read More