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.”

About Stephan Uhrenbacher:

Stephan is a serial entrepreneur and investor. His background in the web business goes back to 1996 when he started GEO.de. Later he founded travelchannel.de, one of the larger travel web sites in Germany before joining lastminute.com in London as Head of Northern European Operations. He then became responsible for the website bild.t-online in Germany. Before starting Qype, he was COO for DocMorris, Europe’s largest mail order pharmacy.

About Stephen Taylor:

Stephen is an experienced leader and entrepreneur. Most recently he led a bold attempt to overthrow the vested interests of the UK power industry and deliver real innovation and service to customers. Previously, Stephen was Regional Vice President and Managing Director for Yahoo! Europe, responsible for all aspects of the European Consumer Business. This included Pan European P&L responsibility for all Media properties as well as Search, Mail & Messenger, Social Media and Kelkoo. In line with his focus on product innovation, Stephen developed much of the Social Search vision for Yahoo!, and led the very successful launch of Yahoo! Answers. Before Yahoo!, Stephen joined the early stages of Overture Inc, the global pioneer of sponsored search marketing. Under his leadership, Overture Europe evolved from a single to a multi-product organisation, expanded from three to 13 European offices and went from loss to profit. Overture was successfully sold to Yahoo! for $1.7bn in 2003. A classical marketer by training, Stephen has previously held a number of senior marketing roles. Before joining Overture, he was involved in founding, leading and selling 2 Internet based businesses and has held a number of other advisory and Board roles.