“When Apple Inc sends out its coveted invitations to major events, one CEO has always been making the guest list of late: Jeremy Stoppelman,” Poornima Gupta reports for Reuters. “The co-founder and chief executive officer of consumer review website Yelp Inc has never taken the stage at these gatherings, but his company has become an important weapon in Apple’s arsenal as it steps up its assault on ally-turned-rival Google Inc. Yelp and a handful of other major consumer content sites, including movie reviewer Rotten Tomatoes and restaurant reservation service OpenTable, will be helping to power Apple’s Siri, the voice-activated iPhone personal assistant, in the new mobile operating system iOS6 [sic].”
“Much more than just a clever feature, Siri is emerging as a key tool for what some in the industry call ‘casual search’ – quickly finding routine information such as a restaurant location. This can bypass Google and other traditional search engines,” Gupta reports. “That serves the interests of Apple, which sees an opportunity to muscle in on its rival’s core business and build related advertising revenue. Siri is also a potential lifeline for Yelp and other content companies, which have found themselves competing with Google.”
Gupta reports, “”Apple is systematically dialing back its reliance on Google services – most recently by announcing it is going into mapping big-time… Rather than compete with Google on keyword search – which would mean battling algorithms refined by the millions of searches performed every day – Apple is taking a different tack by focusing on a subset of the search universe that users are mostly likely to scour while they are out and about. That includes restaurants, movies, sports, business listings, maps and locations… Advertisers value these searches, which are closely linked to location, time and intent, said David Tennenhouse, venture capitalist with New Venture Partners and former CEO of A9.com, the search unit of Amazon.com Inc. ‘You can think of this as cream-skimming,’ Tennenhouse said. ‘Can I skim off some of the most valuable searches? There is a huge range of value here.'”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Waze CEO: Apple going ‘thermonuclear’ on Google Maps – June 15, 2012
Apple using Waze data in new iOS 6 Maps – June 13, 2012
Apple goes thermonuclear on Google with new releases – June 11, 2012
Apple shows off iOS 6 with all new Maps, Siri features, Facebook integration, Shared Photo Streams via iCloud, and more – June 11, 2012
Steve Jobs: ‘I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product; I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this’ – October 20, 2011