Bizzy bows out of the local recommendations market
Online local advertising company ReachLocal (s rloc) announced it was shutting down Bizzy, a location-based discovery service, after it failed to get enough consumer adoption. By mid-November, the mobile app and website will be shut down, the company said in a blog post.
The company said it’s working on a migration plan and creating an exporter so users can download their Try Lists and favorites. Founder Gadi Shamia said the company enjoyed seeing users turn to Bizzy to find places to go and explore their cities.
“While we had many loyal and engaged supporters and we were very proud of the product that we created, ultimately Bizzy did not attract the number of users it needed to sustain itself in the long run,” Shamia said.
Bizzy had some interesting ideas about providing personalized local recommendations. It got people to list their favorite places and then built recommendations based off those entries. It later moved to more of a social model of following other users. It also introduced a check-out feature that let people rate a place when they left, which helped Bizzy better understand a user’s tastes.
But ultimately, it’s hard to stand out in a market where companies like Foursquare, Yelp, Google (s goog), WHERE (s ebay) and others have been working to provide local recommendations. Still, this is an important market and companies like Foursquare are showing how to make discovery work with their Explore and Radar features. And Google, with its acquisition of Zagat, is demonstrating that it’s working hard to own this space. There’s a lot of money to made here in connecting users with local businesses, just not for Bizzy.