The balloon you tied to your wrist for the trip home might be beginning to deflate in the corner of your bedroom but the Qype Summer Party isn’t really over yet.

Firstly, congratulations to Pat for winning the raffle! Not friends with him yet? Here’s a link (although we would be sceptical of friend requests that begin with “So you won £250 in vouchers huh?”)

Not to worry, the chance to be a winner isn’t over yet!

Top Japanese restaurant Tsuru are holding a sake tasting event next month and we have a pair tickets to give away, plus dinner for two after the event.

All you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is review one of the following things and make sure you add the tag ‘partyondude’ to your review.

Qype Summer Party

Circus Circus (who provided our lovely balloons)

93 Feet East (the venue)

Freebird (awesome burritos)

Alibi (Pretox drinks)

Finally, we already have some cracking pictures of the night (see below) but if you would like yours included please send them in to party@qype.com or send us an email with the link to them, so we can add them to the growing body of evidence!

And finally, check out this little video Qyper Warriorgrrl took, and see if you can spot yourself amongst the throng:

We try not to blow our trumpet too much, but last month we hit a very cool milestone at Qype and we wanted to let you know about it and also say a thank you:

In May Qype received over ten million unique visitors. That’s about 228 people every minute, or four people a second.

The launch of Qype Radar Version 2 certainly helped with thousands of users logging via their phones to write reviews and upload pictures, and we’ve also seen a lot more business owners coming to the site to use Qype for Local Business.

But it’s you, the Qype community, we really have to thank for helping us get to that magic number. For the past couple of years you’ve given us your reviews, your feedback, and your time to help us build Qype into Europe’s biggest local review site, and we are very grateful.

If you’re in town then do drop by our party later this month and we’ll buy you a drink to say thank you.

Congratulations to roma49 who just won an iPod shuffle in our weekly Apple goodies prize draw.

We’re drawing a name out of the hat every week, and all you have to do to be in with a chance of winning is to write a review. You can write as many reviews as you like to improve your chances and there’s iPhones up for grabs as well, so it’s worth a shot.

We’ll be drawing another name next week, so make sure to check back to see who’s won.

Starting today we are giving away a weekly Apple gadget to one lucky Qyper in Europe. All it takes to be in with a chance of winning is to write a review of any business at all, whether it’s your local hairdresser, your favourite Italian deli, or the local pub.

Every time you write a review we’ll put your name in the hat to win either an iPod shuffle or a shiny iPhone (or iPod touch if you’re in Spain or Poland).

To get started just use the search box below to find the place you want to review and and then write your review. You will then be automatically entered into our weekly prize draw, and every time you write a new review your name will go in the draw again.

Winners will be announced in the newsletter as well as on this blog so check back for details. Happy Qyping and good luck.

We’re very excited this week as we’ve launched the next version of our mobile application Qype Radar, which has some fantastic new features for us to shout about.

After we launched the first version of Qype Radar we asked for your ideas and suggestions for what we should do next, and by far the most requested feature was the ability to upload reviews and photos from the phone.

Well, we don’t like to disappoint our users, so we locked our tech team in a cupboard and deprived them of pizza and beer until they emerged blinking into the sunlight proudly cradling Qype Radar V2 in their code-stained hands.

The Google Android version has been released already and, as you can see from the video below, writing reviews and uploading them to Qype is now a doddle. No more waiting until you get home to get your thoughts down and out into the world. Welcome to the age of realtime reviewing. We think it’s going to be very cool indeed.

N.B. The iPhone version will be available very soon. We just have to feed and water the tech team first.

Following my last post on the redesign and our action, I want to update you on the latest developments.

Over the last two weeks we focused on the bugs and errors you found and have and have sought to address these “quick fixes” systematically. Throughout this process your feedback has been invaluable in helping us do this. Thank you.

I also promised last time to get back to you on some of the bigger questions you have raised: font size / readablity, colours, reviewer to reviewer feedback mechanisms etc.

Font size: Today we will deploy a larger font size across the site for all review text and a few other elements, which we hope will make reading reviews much easier for everyone.

Colours: Within the next week we will put live an option for all users to amend their settings and use the old colours across elements of the site. When we do this, we would love your further feedback so that we can refine further if necessary.

Reviewer feedback: The team has been working hard to understand the best way to do this from all your comments. We aim to put changes live by the end of next week to improve the ability to track the reviews you have read and quantify the feedback you are receiving on your own reviews.

Obviously this is not the end of this process, so please keep continuing to give us your feedback over in the forums or in the comments right here on the blog.

Thanks again.

Stephen Taylor – CEO.

A quick message from Stephen, our CEO

Since last week’s relaunch we’ve had a lot of great feedback from the Qype Community.

Right now the Qype team is busy assessing, prioritizing and dealing with all the comments you have made. Some bugs and requests should be easy to deliver, but some will need more detailed consideration.

Already Done:

Users can delete other users’ favourites: fixed
Type difficult to read: type darkened
Search at “world” level (where term empty) is broken: fixed

Being Fixed Now:

Minifeed contains ‘empty’ pages, or very few items
Make users names clickable in the minifeed
Implement notifications for compliments and voting buttons
Application server 500 errors: happening too frequently on some
pages
Private profiles: no longer have “add as contact” button
fix event invitations
Bring back old blog structure in new style

We are working on these fixes and will put them live on an ongoing basis. Updates will be posted to this thread.

With regard to the more complex issues (including Performance, Local Search Quality, Feedback/ Compliments Mechanisms and Colour Contrast) we are working on a plan of action and will communicate this to you as soon as possible.

Perhaps the most important area for us to work on is to improve the way we communicate and liaise with the Qype community. With a community which cares this much about Qype, we can achieve great things. But only if we listen better. I will work with the team to try and set up some face to face discussions on these topics, so we can get “under the skin” of all issues.

Last month around 8 million different people came to Qype and read your reviews. My challenge is to keep Qype moving forward so that we provide both what you, our hard-working reviewer community want from the site AND to make it more and more accessible so that your reviews are read by millions and millions of new people.

- STEPHEN TAYLOR CEO

The eagle eyed among you may have noticed that there’s something different about Qype today. No, we haven’t got new glasses or changed our hair a bit… we’ve redesigned.

New colours, new logo, new tagline, new functionality. We’ve totally blown our wardrobe budget for the year, and it’s only February.

So, why have we decided to change things? Well, the site has been around for a few years now and we wanted to bring things bang up-to-date. We didn’t want to change things for the sake of it though, so we’ve tried really hard to bring out those things that we think make Qype unique.

For example, we’ve chosen a handwritten style for our new logo to represent our amazing community of citizen reviewers. You are the life and soul of Qype, and a shiny corporate-style logo just wouldn’t have done that justice. We’ve also got a brand new tagline: (FIND IT. SHARE IT.) which we hope sums up the core of what Qype is about in just a few words.

And, of course, there’s a whole new colour scheme to get used to. We went with blue and red because as well as being easier to read, we think those colours make Qype look a little friendlier, brighter and more welcoming, which we hope reflects just a little of the vibrancy and the freshness of your reviews.

As well as the aesthetic changes there’s a few other things to get used to. Our navigation has changed a bit, so the categories (Arts, and Entertainments, Nightlife etc) are more prominent, and you can even edit the main nav bar to suit you. There’s also a new module called ‘My History’ which helps you track your activity on the site, and we’ve slightly changed the way you give your feedback on other people’s reviews.

We’ve tried to explain all the new stuff in a special section of our FAQ page, but if you’ve got any more questions then there’s a group already set up for you to ask us anything at all, and also give your opinion on the new look Qype.

And, finally, there’s this What is Qype page which has a ton of information about the site.

Another week, another amazing mobile Qype application!

This time we’ve teamed up with Google as part of their Android platform to bring Qype Radar to the world’s first Android-powered phone: the T-Mobile G1.

If you have a G1 then you can download Qype Radar via the Android Market right now and put the power of Qype right in your phone.

You’ll have immediate access to 700,000 in-depth and personal reviews, covering 15,000 cities and towns across Europe. We’ve developed Qype Radar to put people in touch with their surroundings no matter where they are; and that means phone numbers, directions, and recommendations just a couple of clicks away. You can even save your favourite places straight to your address book so you never have to route round for the number of your favourite pizza place ever again (if you’re like us, and always lose those flyers they put through your door, then this is a godsend!)

And that’s not all. While you’re perusing the Android Market why not download lastminute.com’s brand new app nru (pronounced ‘near you’), which “shows you what you can do near you, based on your current location and the direction you’re facing”. They’ve used Qype’s API for their reviews so you know you can trust it :)

Today we’re very pleased to announce the appointment of Stephen Taylor, former Yahoo! Regional Vice President & Managing Director and Managing Director of Overture Europe, as CEO. After more than 3 years as CEO, Qype founder Stephan Uhrenbacher, who remains Qype’s largest private shareholder, is moving to the Board of Directors and will focus on product strategy.

Stephan Uhrenbacher founded Qype in 2005 to offer users an authentic local web experience with user’s reviews of local businesses. Qype has been extremely successful in its international expansion. Being available in 9 countries, Qype is now the biggest European local review website and market leader in UK, France and Germany. To date, over 250,000 members have registered with Qype and have written more than 750,000 reviews. In 2008, the website has grown from two to seven million unique visitors per month globally. Qype approached break-even in Germany by building its business model and attracting advertisers.

For Stephan Uhrenbacher, it was the depth of Stephen Taylor’s experience and expertise that led to the decision to change his position at this point in time. “Stephen brings in all the key qualifications for Qype: His expertise in user generated content, in monetisation of websites through sponsored search marketing as well as in managing pan-European organisations make him an extremely good match for Qype. If you can get someone in of this acumen to ensure the further growth of your company, you have to seize the opportunity. Stephen will make sure that we will continue on our path of very fast usage growth and that we will deliver our planned product innovations in local search and in the mobile sector.”

Stephen Taylor states: “I am very excited to join Qype at this stage. I had been tracking the company for a while and saw how Stephan and the team achieved remarkable progress over the last few years. With its current impressive user base, unique geographical footprint and fantastic product, I believe that the business is now ready for the next phase of growth. This means continual enhancement for a strong community, new product innovations to make finding, sharing and reviewing places and events even better, and importantly new advertiser products to help local businesses better connect with their target audiences.”

Continue Reading »