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Mobile + Location: Where Will the People Go?

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Working to get perfect location information into every hand is never as relevant as it is when we talk about mobile.  The more customers use their devices, the more places they can go, and the more need they have to find new locations.

One of the most popular activities on mobile devices is search, especially local search. When you are out with your phone, you are likely to look up a place you are headed – for directions, for a phone number, for information about whether you can buy what you need.  In fact,

  • 50% of all local searches performed on mobile device
  • 7 of 10 mobile searches = action within one hour
  • 9 of 10 mobile searches = purchase or visit

What We Are Seeing From Businesses – As mobile and local decision making get more closely tied, how are businesses reacting?  At Yext, we see three best practices from our customers:

  1. Ensuring mobile location hygiene to capture the intent of local search – Mobile is not only the place where a customer searches for somewhere she already knows; accurate location information is also the way to connect to more general local searches.  When businesses come up on mobile screens at the right time – on a map, in an app, or in a search engine – it might convert into the sale, or room booking, or dinner option.
  2. Enabling local discovery with fresh content – For many local businesses, mobile is the key to being discovered, the key to finding new customers.  On mobile and in local, people are often looking for specific information around a location near where they are – for a seasonal food item, for what’s happening on Tuesday, for what’s on sale.  In the store, sales teams can use their devices to update their location information – from open hours to events – in real-time to keep listings fresh and relevant.
  3. Differentiating with content creation – The killer feature of the smart phone is, of course, the camera, and the impact for business is that all employees can become local content creators.  With the right permissioning for brand protection, adding photos and videos to business listings is often the easiest way to create immediately richer, engaging experiences right when customers are looking.

What We’re Doing About It – At Yext, we are working to make mobile easy to manage for businesses in two ways:

  • First, we want to make it easy to reach customers with the best location information using our Network.  On mobile browsers, we connect our through 45+ publishers of maps, apps, and local search experiences and within apps environments, we work with 20+ applications, from HopStop to Foursquare.
  • Then, we want to make it easy to update and post new information – with our Android and iPhone apps.  Our apps allow you to:
    • Review your mobile listings
    • Update your Featured Messages as deals and products change day to day
    • Take new photos and videos as local content and automatically upload to your profile

We have built our network and our tools to help our customers grow their businesses through local search and local discovery.  By doubling down on mobile, we further our mission: to put perfect location information in every hand.

Find more information about Yext Mobile here.

It’s easier to build the world’s map than map the world’s location data

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Think of the mall nearest to where you live.  How many times over the past decade have the primary building or roads around the mall changed significantly?  Probably once, maybe twice at most.

Now, think of the stores in your mall.  How many times over the past decade have you seen new stores open, old stores close, or store locations change within your mall?  If your mall is like most malls, you’ve seen hundreds of changes over a decade.

Now think about even deeper information about a particular store.  What time do they open? What’s on sale?  What are their holiday hours?   Who’s the store manager?  What’s on display in the window?  This store-specific information changes even more often than the basic stuff about location.

And that’s why it’s easier to build a map of the world than it is to map the world’s location data.

It’s easier to keep up with the terrain, physical building structures, and roads around the outside of your mall since they don’t change that often.  It’s a lot harder to stay on top of the critical business information inside, because it’s changing all the time.

Getting it right requires constant updates – best accomplished by the business itself, who has an incentive to keep their information current everywhere.

Yext sells Felix Division to IAC’s CityGrid Media

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About a year ago I went to pitch the legendary Ben Horowitz at Andreessen Horowitz for an investment in Yext.  They passed.  The company was in a weird spot.  We had a growing pay-per-call business (Felix) with great technology and a bright future.  But we also had a brand new product (PowerListings) that instantly syncs business locations across platforms.  We thought PowerListings had the potential to change the world.   I wanted to focus on it and we needed capital.  Ben’s advice: Why not sell your pay-per-call business and use that capital to grow Yext?

My gut reaction: “that’s a crazy risk”.  Felix represented 90% of our revenue, was growing, and pay-per-call was our identity.  PowerListings, at the time, was in its infancy– promising early traction, but too soon enough to completely bet our future on it.  A few months later, I realized that’s precisely what Ben did!  In pivoting LoudCloud to Opsware, he sold LoudCloud’s hosting business to EDS to raise capital and achieve total strategic clarity in building Opsware.  That was maybe a crazy bet, but it turned out to be the right one.  But aren’t the best bets are the crazy ones?  I set the wheels in motion to find a great home for Felix.

Here’s to the crazy ones.  Today, we’re announcing that IAC’s CityGrid Media has acquired Felix.

Since that meeting a year ago, Yext has become the undisputed market leader for software to manage and sync business locations across platforms. We’re now bigger than our original business by all conceivable metrics.  Already, Yext syncs millions of updates for over 70,000 customer locations, including tens of thousands of small business, and 10 Fortune 100 companies.  We plan to invest every penny of the proceeds from our sale of Felix to make it possible for every business location on the planet to instantly sync their information everywhere.

This completes our business transition.   Thank you to Ben Horowitz for the great advice.  In his honor, I would end with a hip-hop quote, but since I’m more of a 60s music fan, this one comes to mind for the new owners of Felix:

“Take good care of my baby.  Please don’t ever make her blue-e-e-e.  Just tell her that you love her, make sure you’re thinking of her, in everything you do-o-o-o.”

Yext Expands Network with CliqSearch, ChamberofCommerce.com, and USCity.net

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We’re excited to announce that the Yext Network has expanded its reach with the launch of three new partners: CliqSearch, ChamberofCommerce.com, and USCity.net! These sites will be included in the Yext offering at no additional cost, ensuring that the authoritative listing information for Yext customers is always present and up-to-date on our new partner sites.

CliqSearch is a social connectivity directory, combining a business’ Facebook, Foursquare, and Twitter details onto a single page, and empowering consumers with relevant social knowledge. ChamberofCommerce.com focuses largely on web presence solutions, and facilitates connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide. And USCity.net is one of the oldest business directories on the web, having launched a complete redesign in May 2012 with a renewed focus on category search.

Since September, Yext has powered over 1 million location updates, instantly syncing a business’s location and dynamic service information across dozens of search platforms. Today, with the addition of CliqSearch, ChamberofCommerce.com, and USCity.net, we come one step closer to getting these real-time updates out everywhere, and most importantly, giving end users the best local information.

To learn more about our full PowerListings offering, check out the Complete Package.

Yext Launches The Next Yext

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New software that syncs local business info includes multi-location mode, built-in listings scanner, and review monitoring.


[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dhVLZ8UXw0]

Yext today unveiled The Next Yext, the newest generation of its software that instantly syncs local business information across 50 publishers.  The new version features an overhauled interface designed to enable large and small businesses to share their most up-to-date local info.  The new release includes powerful multi-location features for easily managing thousands of locations at warp speeds, a built-in listings scanner and profile builder, and review monitoring.  Since September, Yext has powered over 950,000 authoritative business location updates, including 67,535 address updates, 108,757 business phone number updates, and 154,106 business hours updates.

“Business information is just as dynamic as social information.  Just like making new friends, taking a new job, or moving to a new city, business information like specials, availability, and featured products change around the clock,” said Yext co-founder Howard Lerman.  “The Next Yext was specially designed to support the never-ending business update cycle for large and small businesses. Today’s Next Yext will advance our mission to synchronize the world’s local information, by enabling businesses with more advanced controls, providing publishers with authoritative data, and ultimately, getting end users the most timely local info.”

Yext also announced new featured network partners Manta and Factual will join the PowerListings network, expanding its monthly reach by over 30,000,000 unique visitors.  Yext also announced that seven additional partners, YellowPageCity, AmericanTowns.com, CliqSearchcom, USCity.net, ChamberOfCommerce.com, 8coupons, and Alike have joined the PowerListings network.