The Smalltown Blog

Smalltown Acquires Local2Me Service

EXCITING NEWS: Smalltown has acquired Local2me, a website and email service here in the Bay Area that enables people to post questions and receive answers from their neighbors. Smalltown has a similar functionality that goes a step further by allowing users to attach a Webcard posting to their answer, thus connecting a customer with a problem to a business with a solution.

So why did Smalltown purchase Local2Me?

1. Local2Me’s epicenter is Belmont, CA, so it’s a fortuitous way to instantly triple our user base in our existing towns.

2. When we convert Local2Me’s 30,000 discussions into our Webcard format, our users will benefit from deep local data acquired over the last 7 years. Now when one does a search for “Who is the best guitar teacher in town?” there will be tens of thousands of responses for us to search. In other words, merging Local2Me’s content into our platform instantly gives our users access to 7 years of deep local knowledge.

3. Local2Me already thrives on the “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” online culture that encourages users to contribute content; not just lurk and read it. The energy of this user base plus our enabling technology will quickly turn our existing sites into paradigms for how entertaining, useful and profitable a Smalltown site is when it’s fully embraced by a community.

Following are Smalltown’s press release and the letter Michael Olivier (Founder and CEO) sent to the Local2Me community.

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SMALLTOWN ACQUIRES LOCAL2ME FOR ITS ACTIVE USER BASE AND DEEP LOCAL CONTENT

Integration of Local2Me Online Community Accelerates Adoption of Smalltown along San Francisco Peninsula and Prepares Company for National Rollout

SAN MATEO, Calif. – October 15, 2007 – Smalltown® (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™ 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’ve 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.

Download smalltown_local2me_release_final.doc

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Michael Olivier's Letter to the Local2Me Community

Dear Local2Me Friends & Neighbors,

I am very pleased to announce that the Local2Me email and web service has been acquired by Smalltown, Inc. (www.smalltown.com).

Earlier this year I decided it was time for Local2Me’s next step, which was diverging from my career path at Yahoo!. Local2Me is a thriving online community that’s an important tool in my daily life, as I know it has been in many of yours. I am very happy that it will have a continued lifeline in the hands of Smalltown, which through my research I found to be the best match to the spirit of L2M. Check out their video at www.smalltown.com/theater_smalltown.html

I have been extremely impressed with Smalltown CEO Hal Rucker, who I’ve known since we worked together at Excite.com. He’s an exceptional person, with an unusually straightforward, honest style and high level of integrity. I know Local2Me will be in good hands with him, and I am excited about Smalltown’s direction and potential. They are using new technology to make it easy for you to share more and different kinds of information than can be conveyed just in email.

The Local2Me service launched in 2000, and over the last seven years community members have posted over 31,000 neighborhood messages in 90 towns about wide-ranging topics, from great pediatric dentists to Halloween costumes for sale, trustworthy appliance repair, neighborhood crime issues, anti-raccoon measures, and more! It’s a rich, ever-growing collection of unique local knowledge that will continue to thrive at Smalltown. For now, you won’t notice any difference in the L2M service because it will be a while before Smalltown integrates L2M into their platform. Also, Hal admits up front that the Smalltown Discussions section needs to be improved before integrating the L2M community, and his team will be soliciting ideas and feedback from L2M users as part of the redesign process.

Many have helped me with the service over the years, but I want to especially call out two people. Big thanks to Danny van der Rijn, who has helped me with site moderation since 2003. And the biggest thanks to my wife, Kasey, who has been my helper, advisor, and supporter from the beginning!

Thank you all for your participation on and support of Local2Me. It has been a lot of fun and I look forward to its next steps with Smalltown.

Cheers,

Michael Olivier

Smalltown Video: Hear it from Our Customers

I hear from Smalltown.com users every day, telling me how well their Webcards are meeting their need to drive customers and connect with their community. When I tell people about the good feedback, most are justifiably too cynical to take me seriously. I am, after all, extremely biased. Fortunately, we just completed a video showcasing real testimonials from real Smalltown users and customers.

Click here to watch the video >>

- Hal Rucker