The new Truvo has launched!
At the beginning of the month we went live with our new user proposition, a local search and community site called -guess- Truvo.
The New Truvo
The site is live in Belgium -for now-, and we will soon launch Portugal and Ireland.
It allows user to leave comments, reviews, ratings and pictures about places in Belgium. The database cover almost 800,000 ‘places’, and we got about 5,000 good quality reviews in the first weeks.
As searching and surfing habits are changing, Truvo is our attempt to satisfy such changing habits and youngish demographic that feels more comfortable in searching, contributing and sharing than just searching or looking up.
Truvo belongs to the same product domain that players like Yelp and Qype are occupying, and that -fresh off the press- also AT&T is rushing into (possibly later this year?).
From my point of view, the biggest difference between a yellow pages site and a site like Truvo is in content control and ownership.
While in yellow the site owner controls (but doesn’t necessarily owns) the content, in a site like Truvo (or Yelp, or Qype), the site owner owns the content (contributors usually give up IP), but doesn’t control it - the user does-. Therefore the balance shifts toward the user, whereas in sites like yellow pages there is a general tendency to cater more for the advertiser needs.
This creates quite a dilemma from a monetization standpoint: if you control the content (like in yellow), then you have a ‘credible threat’ in front of a prospect not to publish its site, it therefore follows that you can ask for some consideration for inclusion into the site. When you don’t control the content, such threat doesn’t exist, as any user can add content about a place, or even a place itself (and therefore a business). The advertiser can therefore add itself to the index, and the implicit ‘no-censorship’ commitment from the publisher toward the user cannot be broken by taking the listing offline without undermining the user proposition and the nature of the site itself. At the end of the day, an advertiser is also a user.
It means that different products need to be used and developed to monetize the usage in a local search and community property versus a commercial look up property. I will stop here though, I don’t want to bother you with the details 
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great ! this way we stay tuned with the market !