Qype - Live and tell

No, this is not a PR thing for me. I am now trying to share my personal experience Leo Hickman style… Quite happy with the URL I found. Sustainabl.

While we do love the “live and tell”, that we put underneath our logo on the UK site, we just got too many requests from people asking us, what our name means.

The true story : I wanted a name that can be copyrighted, has not too many letters, can be verbalised.

We then did an awful lot of combinations of words that did fit to what Qype was supposed to do. And one of the core things is to separate the places that provide real “Quality” from those that are just hyped up. So we ended up with Quality or Hype - Qype!

I do hope nobody asks us again.

Every two minutes, there is a new tool on the block that a web 2.0 startup needs to use in order to remain cool, sexy and all kinds of other things.

Two years ago, you needed your own flickr account, then came Secondlife, then Twitter, then Facebook. In between you should organise your events with wevent.org (cool site by the way) -  Not sure what it will be tomorrow, so I tend to get a bit  bored of following all those gimmicks. I gave up using Twitter myself, unless I am in a queue at an airport (in case you are interested: stephanu, but beware: may contain explicit German).

That said, our corporate Twitter account has proven to be very useful for us, as Markus from blognation has discovered.

Qype are pleased to announce the appointments of Phillip Chambers as new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and Andrew Hunter as On-line Marketing Manager.

Phillip Chambers and Andrew Hunter will be joining Qype from Gumtree.com, and report to CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher.

Phillip Chambers will become Qype’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO). He was Head of Technology at Gumtree.com. He has also previously held analyst and consultancy roles for Accenture and Hewlett Packard, and was a co-founder of privateproperty.co.uk. At Qype, Phillip will be responsible for all tech operations and development.
Andrew Hunter is to fulfill the position of On-line Marketing Manager at Qype. He will be responsible for online marketing and advertising sales. During his time at Gumtree, he helped grow the company into one of the UK’s largest classifieds website and also brings experience from his time at Thomas Cook, where he was Search Marketing Manager.
Qype Founding CEO Stephan Uhrenbacher said of the appointments: “Adding Phil and Andrew’s experience will enable us to accelerate our already impressive growth for a business based on user generated content. Also, Qype is transforming itself from a German brand into a truly international one and we are strengthening our commitment to the UK as a core market for Qype.“ Uhrenbacher himself is known for his expertise around on-line businesses thanks to his prior involvement with several companies, including previous roles as Head of Northern Europe for lastminute.com and Commercial Director for www.opodo.co.uk
Qype is also recruiting a permanent Managing Director for the UK market, a role which is currently held on an interim basis by Isabelle Ratinaud, former European Marketing Director at Opodo.

Stephan Uhrenbacher, CEO of Qype, is speaking at the mad.co.uk conference on Social Media for Business; the conference will be held in London on October 30th, 2007.
Stephan will be talking about the critical success factors for making social media work, using Qype as a case study. Learn more about the conference

At Qype we will keep surprising you with nice things throughout the year….here is one to get your mind off the dreadful weather. Take pictures of places you review and win Odeon cinema tickets. Then you can go to the pictures on us! (it’s kind of pictures for pictures…..)
Here’s the fineprint:

• Add at least 3 photos for places you review between 1st and 31st of August and you will be automatically entered in our draw to win cinema tickets.
• Winners will receive 2 cinema tickets valid at Odeon cinemas across the UK.
• You have to be a resident in the UK and there will be no cash equivalent for the prize.
• Should you be the lucky winner, you will be contacted between August 31st and September 5th by means of a Qype message, asking you for your name and postal adress so we can send you the tickets.

In the same way that Daffyd Thomas (our favourite character from Little Britain) challenged our perception of quietly conservative Welsh communities, the recent review by dmj1962 of the station with the world’s longest name, Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch (I had to cut and paste that one from the review!) has caused issues to the layout of the Qype homepage.

Our Qype site team was unprepared for the abundance of vowels and consonants emanating from our Welsh relatives; a new challenge they are tacking head on - but in the meantime we may to go to the shorter version. Sorry dmj1962!.