Last week various news and startup blogs were speculating about the news of yet another possible Google acquisition – This time of Yelp, the local review site which it turns out, has turned down an offer of $550 million plus earnouts according to TechCrunch at the last minute of signing a deal.

Why would CEO of Yelp Jeremy Stoppleman drop the deal, especially this late in the game after what must have been months of talks between them and Google. I’m sure the details will surface, but until then here are some thoughts which I find interesting:

-Google were about to offer nearly half a billion to be able to take over Yelp and most probably integrate this data into their SERPS. This would have been their second biggest acquisition after YouTube.

-Yelp must have either had a moment of clarity (maybe under valued their business or saw implications which they didn’t want),  had a counter offer from another party (other search engine or social network), wanted a PR stunt to boost their visibility, or wanted to see how much Google valued their turf?

To me this says a lot about where Google wants to be, and how it will want to differentiate itself from its competitors. From a data centric perspective, being able to get real world feedback on offline business brings them one more facet of information which they can use to bring the best search experience. By integrating offline shopping, entertainment and restaurant information / reviews they would have seriously boosted the reach of Google Local, and grabbed even more online real estate.

There are still many areas including local which Google and the other search engines would like to be involved with including social networks, real time social search, mobile, cashback and loyalty shopping, voucher codes, travel, finance and I think it is simply a matter of time until the likes of Bing, Yahoo, Google and Facebook, Twitter all try and integrate into these areas one way or another.

What we have seen in the past, and is still true today is that Google is very much interested in not only being a search engine sending users to their destination, but they want to be the destination too. Actually, they want to be with you throughout the journey from the browser to the call!

With Yelp turning down this deal, we should all keep an eye on whats happening in the local space – Should make for interesting viewing in the next couple weeks or months!

WorkoutBox is a vibrant fitness community featuring professional personal trainers, and a whole system of workouts and training aids. Although there are similar sites online such as Traineo, Gyminee, and Sparkpeople I got to meet Simon Turner – one of the founders of Workout Box at a recent entrepreneur meetup.

After quitting his full time job a year and a half ago, Simon has built WorkoutBox along with some professional personal trainers to offer a different approach to the online fitness space.

WorkoutBox features a large range of workouts, which have been designed by expert personal trainers and provide registered users with a step by step plan to achieve their fitness goals efficiently.

There is also a thriving community of fitness enthusiasts and the in house personal trainers are there to provide help and support to members.

You can also follow your progress with the training logs and discuss with the personal trainers to overcome any stumbling blocks.

If you are into your gym / fitness I recommend you check them out at www.workoutbox.com

Joey wrote:

I am a young entrepreneur, and I stumbled across this site today.
You have a great thing going on here.
I have a question, simple to ask maybe more difficult to answer.
I have a lot of my layout done in the physical realm. I’m an idea person. I
play music and I’m busy savvy.

Where do most of these website start-ups find their programmers?
Its hard to believe the idea people themselves are all computer-savvy.

I’m very passionate, full of enthusiasm, and have a partner who is an amazing
computer person. She’s very busy though right now,
so I need to find trustworthy and passionate programmers to work with me as
freelancers.

An answer would mean the world to me!
Thank you for this website ,
Joey

There are many stumbling blocks to starting a web projects, and unless you come from a technical background you will need to either find partners for a joint venture, or look to hire a freelancer or agency to build your website or project (you can also buy a few books and start learning, but we’ll focus on some practical approaches for the time poor).

Finding a joint venture partner is an ideal way to minimize your risk, and is an excellent way to get your project kick started. The best place to get started is in your group of friends, work colleagues, or by checking out the forums available for your topic.

In a joint venture partnership, each member can focus on their core speciality, and because you will be sharing revenues there is an incentive for all parties involved to contribute. The advantage here is that you won’t have to invest in web development, design, SEO, marketing, PR which means you could launch a project much sooner, and at lower cost than if you were flying solo.

Another popular option available is to hire a freelancer. You can either hire a local professional by placing an ad in a local paper, or you can use websites such as Elance.com, gumtree.com, or sitepoint.com. Look out for design contests, and users with a high post count or recommendations.

You can also attract some great talent by targeting your local colleges and universities, students are always on the lookout for after study work, or work experience to pad out their CV’s.

There are many skilled professionals specialising in every area, which you can hire on a hourly or project basis which can provide you with some great work at low cost. Elance is a great starting point, as you can review each provider’s CV, and view feedback from previous projects.
Make sure you consider the provider’s expertise, the feedback received, as well as the location where the provider is from. Also, be prepared to spend more time micro managing, and reviewing when dealing with non English natives, or bargain basement quotes!

Another option available is to use an agency, although this is usually a more expensive option, agencies can provide many additional skills to the table, and their experience can prove beneficial for growing your Start-up. Alas not all agencies are born equal, so make sure you always ask for references from happy customers.

Raphael Mudge the founder of Dashnine Media contacted us about his latest venture, Feedbackarmy.com

Usability testing, user reviews and focus groups are recommended to ensure the success of your projects, and will enable the identification of problems and issues early on. Unfortunately usability testing can be expensive, and finding the right user sample, organising user surveys, can be time consuming and over the budget of many smaller startups (and many large companies!).

Feedback Army takes usability testing to the next level, and enables you to submit a website, survey questions, and get up to 50 responses within days – Not weeks.

Feedback Army taps into crowdsourcing through the Amazon Mechanical Turk webservice, which enables it to leverage an on-demand and scalable workforce which is paid per HIT (or task). This is a great way to get access to a huge workforce, which can execute tasks within minutes for a few $$$.

Feedback Army sent us an invitation to try out their service, and within two minutes we had submitted our survey. We checked again a day later, and we had 10 responses waiting full of interesting feedback from users – Not bad!

The service starts at $7 for 10 up to $33 for 50 responses – This is really affordable, and you will find that this is a great way of getting real world feedback at short notice – Ideal for testing anything from offers, landing pages, websites, the possibilities area endless.

One element I would suggest to be added to the service would be an option to segment responses by demographic – answers from 10 random users has value, but feedback from targeted users is ultimately more powerful.

So don’t delay, check out the service at feedbackarmy.com and use it to improve your products, services, and websites.

With the economy in crisis, and a new year ahead of us its time for reflection, new resolutions, as well as planning for the year ahead.

So what is Indie Startups going to be doing in 2009?

Well, first off we are back from holiday, therefore will be able to blog more frequently about the latest bootstrapped startups, and inspirational projects going around. Also I am very keen on helping startups take their projects to the next level, so will be publishing a series of guides covering important topics from finding good JV partners, to building your audience, and ensuring that your project either generates revenue or looks attractive to investors.

Also this blog is very much about your startup projects – Therefore use our contact form to let us know about your projects so that we can feature the best ones and get you added coverage.

I got a great email today from Andres Krogh giving us a heads up about his new site called iamsaintnick.com which allows relatives to find out what their loved ones want for Christmas.

His elevator pitch goes as follows: “Folks can go to the site, punch in a phone number, and have Santa go call that person to covertly get gift ideas.  The call happens live on the site, and the call is recorded for the user to hear after the Santa recon is complete.”

Iamsaintnick was developed by Matt Steckler, a developer who recently lost his job at a tech startup two months ago, and designed by Andres Krogh. The telephony is powered by Twilio which was launched a only a few days ago see our review here.

What is truly impressive is that a few days after the launch of Twilio, Matt and Andres designed, spec’d, and built iamsaintnick from the ground up in the 4 days since their public launch…Well done guys

The only issue we could find was that they don’t yet announce that the call is recorded, which is a requirement in some States, and is especially important when dealing with children. But it sounds like this will be added soon. Edit: There is now a mention at the beginning of the phone call that says “this call is being recorded” to try and make it extra clear.

Check it out at iamsaintnick.com, its a great little seasonal project which has lots of potential (voice recognition product suggestions maybe?) which should give you some ideas of how you can leverage the recently launched Twilio in your own applications.

Twilio launched in private beta last week (and is now available for all), and is promising to bring some radical changes to web telephony services by enabling web developers through its simple REST API, and a simple pay as you go billing philosophy.

Thanks to Twilio you no longer have to deal with complex infrastructures, telecom programming languages, and stacks of PBX software to implement inbound and outbound phone applications.

Twilio’s CEO Jeff Lawson says that while many other web telephony services already exist (like Asterisk, an open source project), these technologies tend to be very complex and difficult to use, even for experienced developers. Lawson says that Twilio is looking to commoditize these phone services by making them much more accessible to developers, by introducing a set of very intuitive commands.

The Twilio REST API primarily consists of 5 commonly used phone actions:

• Say
• Play
• Record
• Dial
• Gather a phone number

Thanks to these, its very easy to replicate some of GrandCentral’s core functionality in only around 15 lines of code!

Twilio is adopting the cloud service model, where no contracts are required and where you are charged flat fees for calls depending on the number of minutes used and the number of phone numbers needed.

We really like Twilio, as it has comoditized what used to be a dark art which usually involved a lot of hardware, software and lines of complex code to achieve. Plus its a perfect example of a really attractive startup prime for an aquisition, featuring a great idea, great packaging, a talented team, and some great team experience (CEO Jeff Lawson was a Product Manager for AWS).

Check it out at Twilio.com

I stumbled onto Entrip.com a while ago, but checked it out again recently as I’m planning my winter trips to Cuba and Thailand. I must say, the site looks much nicer aesthetically, and I see the guys behind it have been busy improving the functionality.

For those of you which have not tried EnTrip yet, its an online app where you can arrange your trip, and map it out using an easy map-based interface. You can then add photos, videos, and blogs to each location to document your trip for family and friends.

What I really like about the site is that you can add notes to pictures and videos, which you might have later lost track of. Plus its great to check out other peoples trips, as you can frequently get some awesome tips and ideas you wouldn’t find in a travel guide.

Whichever experience days or trips get you excited, you are sure to find travellers like you to help you plan your next trip, or give you some ideas to get you started.

Check out EnTrip.com today.

As internet users become more and more cautious of where they spend their cash in light of the economic downturn, the bigger the impact of website and product review websites in the purchase process. Who will you trust Dell, or some smaller firm selling desktop PC’s online?

Well we’ve had a look at Trustpilot, and this decision might become a whole lot easier. This innovative UK startup have launched a reputation monitoring service based on user comments and reviews, which are then presented to users through their website and their browser app which overlays a trust rating on top of Google results.

Checking out user reviews for a website becomes as easy as reading the colour of an icon that changes from red to green will give you an indication of how trustworthy a given company is, and by placing your pointer over that icon where additional information is displayed.

The information provided includes the percentage of approval the company has, the actual number of reviews as well as a “TrustScore”

Check it out at Trustpilot.co.uk.

Twitter is great but following someone leads to them receiving an email notification that a potential “stalker” is following them…Damn, the plan is foiled you think! Well don’t worry TweetStalk is here and it allows you to “follow” Twitter users without them knowing you are doing it. Normally Twitter will tell you when someone new has subscribed to your feed, but because this uses a Firefox Add-On and appears to modify the Twitter page itself via Greasemonkey you are then able to follow the person without them knowing.

On top of that, theres a neat RSS feed available too!

Looking at their tracking, it looks like Nashville, TN based Sitening are behind the service. For the record Sitening are a technology focused web design and search marketing company which have previously released the sweet Snipplr and Raven SEO Tools.

Click here to check out TweetStalk today.