SAN MATEO, Calif., Oct. 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Smalltown(R) (http://www.smalltown.com/), the company building the "Local Web" comprised of user and merchant generated content sites that connect businesses and their neighbors, today announced the purchase of Local2Me, a seven-year-old online community.
Both Smalltown and Local2Me have developed platforms that enable people to ask questions and receive answers from their own neighbors, creating a repository of deep, trusted local knowledge. The Local2Me service has thousands of dedicated users and over 30,000 discussions about local topics. This acquisition accelerates Smalltown's deep dive into the San Francisco Peninsula market, shortening the timeline for their national rollout.
"Local2Me is a vibrant virtual community where people in the Bay Area have been discussing everything in their real communities since 2000," said Hal Rucker, CEO and co-founder of Smalltown. "The depth of the information is astounding. You can find a highly recommended orthopedic surgeon to do a shoulder replacement surgery, or discover the best block in town to take kids trick-or-treating. By merging Local2Me's deep user generated content with our technology that integrates local discussions with rich merchant generated content, we will have an exciting paradigm for future Smalltown deployments."
Smalltown's Patent-Pending Webcard(TM) Postings -- A New Type of Web Presence for Small Businesses and Their Neighbors
Smalltown is empowering neighborhood communities with an integrated online user generated content tool called a "Webcard posting." Similar to social networking and blogging sites that create online communities with simple features for posting and sharing content, the Webcard posting is a specialized tool that meets the unique needs of small businesses and their geographically defined community. Webcard postings are engineered to be indexed by the popular search engines, including Yahoo! and Google. Currently, Webcard postings can include rich text, hyperlinks, photo galleries, videos, coupons and anonymous contact forms. Soon they will include opt-in newsletters, appointment calendars and other advanced features.
"When I decided to find a new home for the Local2Me service, I looked for a company with a spirit that matched ours, and the technology that would not only help the Local2Me community thrive, but would connect them to neighborhood businesses as well," said Michael Olivier, CEO and Founder of Local2Me. "Smalltown's unique user experience makes it incredibly easy for anyone to research and contribute to their town's local knowledgebase, and that includes businesses. They have combined user generated content with rich merchant generated content in a novel and very useful way. Now, when a neighbor recommends a car mechanic, they can easily include all the valuable information found in the car mechanic's Webcard posting."
"Smalltown's pilot towns on the San Francisco Peninsula are living proof that, to be adopted as a complete local reference tool by both neighbors and merchants in a given community, you need to take a deep and narrow approach to community building," said Clint Chao, Smalltown's investor and general partner at Formative Ventures. "The integration of Local2Me's active discussion database into Smalltown's local sites is another step to demonstrate the incredible value of a Smalltown website after it has been embraced by a community."
About Smalltown
Smalltown currently hosts community sites in five towns, containing over 19,000 Webcard postings. Privately held and headquartered in San Mateo, California, Smalltown was founded in 2005. The company is building an infrastructure for today's Local Web, which will support a network of hyper-local Smalltown community sites equipped to empower local economies and promote the vitality, individuality and immediacy of each community -- one "Smalltown" at a time. Smalltown is funded by Formative Ventures. For more information visit http://www.smalltown.com/ or watch the video at http://www.smalltown.com/theater_smalltown.html.
Smalltown
