“Burbank-based CityWaboo has launched yet another online local search site, focused on ratings, reviews, and recommendations of local businesses. The company–which had rolled out the site in beta form last May–is focused on letting friends and others share ratings and reviews of local restaurants and other businesses. The service, which also has launched a Facebook application tied to its reviews, sells advertising to local businesses. The site follows CitySearch, InsiderPages.com, Angie’s List, Yahoo Local, Yelp, and ill fated Judy’s Book into the local business reviews and guide market.”-socalTECH.com

Business Week recently wrote an article titled Where Customers go to Praise (or Bash) You and CityWaboo was profiled within the article, along with some other up and coming players! Locally targeted online advertising is becoming recognized more as an advertising and marketing avenue, as it provides high visibility to a wide range of demographics. Learn more about the advantages to placing a business listing on CityWaboo.

CityWaboo focuses on providing a place for people to connect with one another and get information through reviews and recommendations on where there friends go for a particular service or item. CityWaboo is a place to find where to go from the people that you know, giving you more relevant results when you’re looking for a particular business or service. Create an account, find your friends, and write reviews!

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City Waboo Links Business Sites to Social Networks

By Mark R. Madler

An advertising budget of $39 won’t go far for any business.It won’t get many fliers, and certainly cannot rent a billboard or buy time on television or radio.But City Waboo has a deal for you.
For that $39, Eduard Arakelyan and partner Armen Akopyan will post a company profile on their website complete with product or service descriptions, photos, contact information and a customer comment section.

Other websites can make similar claims - City Search, for example - but what makes City Waboo different is the capability to link the profile through social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook to get a company’s name out to hundreds, if not thousands, more customers.

“Were taking word of mouth and putting technology behind it,” Arakelyan said.

Arakelyan and Akopyan found their initial success through a website promoting businesses in Burbank and Glendale.

Not wanting to limit themselves to two cities, they expanded their concept nationally through City Waboo. They beta-tested the site last spring and officially launched it just before Christmas.

City Waboo has listings in every zip code in the nation with a concentration on 15 major cities with the highest populations.

The name, by the way, came in a moment Arakelyan described as an epiphany and was tested with focus groups, friends and family.

Traditional forms of advertising won’t cut it anymore as newspaper circulation drops and devices such as TiVo allow viewers to skip television commercials.

Customers find no relevance in just picking a business out of the phone book or as more likely happens these days, from a search engine.

While online advertising accounts for less than 10 percent of all ad spending, it still brought in $21.1 billion in 2007, according to preliminary figures from the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers. That is a 25 percent increase over the $16.9 billion earned in 2006.

When looking for a new restaurant, a reliable mechanic or a dentist, people generally rely on their family and friends for recommendations.

Those personal recommendations were what Arakelyan and Akopyan went after with the social networking capabilities at the site.

“When we first came out in beta last May and June, a lot of people who approached us said it was great but if they were going out to a restaurant or needed a lawyer or something they were going to ask their inner circle,” Arakelyan said.

The pair comes from an advertising background having operated Trimark Advertising for more than 10 years. Their fondness for assisting small businesses comes from having parents who are business owners – Arakelyan’s operate a flower shop and Akopyan’s a restaurant.

Even small business owners find going online is necessary for marketing and advertising purposes. Finding someone you can trust is harder.

“If you do not have a reliable vendor you can depend on that can effect the growth of your business,” said Ray Shahin, owner of Le Soleil Day Spa and Salon in Glendale who has a profile on City Waboo.

After starting the business two years ago, Shahin fired the companies he worked with to create a website. Then he found Trimark, which helped not only with the website but also business cards and other media buys.

“The business took off pretty quick from the way they built my website,” Shahin said.

In creating a profile for the site, Arakelyan stresses how the business itself gets involved, working with a marketing department that helps them refine their keywords to optimize searches and how to best describe their product or service.

“As the website grows and more and more people see their listing, more and more buzz gets generated,” Arakelyan said.

CityWaboo.com, an Internet company started by local men, is gaining favor among Web surfers.

A Burbank-based Internet search engine company is helping users navigate the often overwhelming amount of information on the World Wide Web, with a little help from their own friends.

CityWaboo.com builds upon the traditional idea of a searchable online directory, allowing users to not only hunt for businesses, restaurants and the like, but to immediately access reviews on the businesses in the results from friends who use the site. Users also have the option to search only the businesses that their friends recommend.

The site — which started as BurbankGlendale.com, a local business directory — essentially takes word-of-mouth advertising into the Internet age, said Eduard Arakelyan, president of CityWaboo, who co-founded the company along with Glendale resident Armen Akopyan.

“Catering to local businesses over the past four or five years, a lot of them were saying, ‘Yeah it’s great to advertise, but most of the business we get is from word of mouth,’” he said. “So we incorporated that into the social network on the site, where you can build your own community of friends and family and people, and you can directly search their recommended businesses.”

Growing that community has taken CityWaboo national, and now the site helps local customers patronize local businesses and provides a resource for out-of-towners who may be visiting the area.

Since CityWaboo launched at the end of December, the site is attracting about 100,000 visitors per month, Arakelyan said.

“And we’re increasing it about 5 and 10% per day,” he said. “As more search engines get us on there, and more marketing and social community aspect, it’s growing pretty rapidly, which is great news for us and the local community.”

CityWaboo has also joined up with popular social networking site Facebook.com, enabling users to view comments, ratings and recommendations from their Facebook friends.

Twenty-six-year-old Hector Ayala, who came to the United States from Spain nine years ago, has used CityWaboo for about four months and said the format is distinct from other sites on the Web.

“I use other kinds of websites like CitySearch, but I also use Facebook and Myspace.com . but this combines them,” he . . said. I use it for convenience. I can have friends and talk to them, and at the same time I can find new restaurants and read reviews.”

In turn, Ayala faithfully submits reviews of restaurants and other places he has been to steer them in the right direction, he said.

And businesses can benefit as much as consumers, as smaller local companies can achieve a larger presence through the website and positive chatter among users, Arakelyan said.

By Chris Wiebe
Burbank Leader

Web Site Features 14 Million Business Listings and Adaptive Search Technology; Advertising Rates Based on Monthly Fees Instead of Less-Favorable Pay-per-Click Pricing.

BURBANK, CA–(MARKET WIRE)–May 8, 2007 — CityWaboo.com, a community resource site, today announced the beta release of its site, located at www.CityWaboo.com. Visitors can now browse CityWaboo.com and try key features and services while the site’s functionality is continuously tested and improved.

With a mission to connect businesses with residents in communities nationwide, and provide businesses with affordable, measurable and cost-effective online advertising, CityWaboo.com offers a variety of marketing options.

“Our goal is to provide communities with a valuable resource tool to quickly find information while also helping businesses build their customer base with local and national exposure,” said Eduard Arakelyan, co-founder of CityWaboo.com.

CityWaboo.com provides a variety of customized advertising packages to suit almost any budget. Basic business listings are free and enhanced packages are available starting at $39.95 per month. Listings are optimized to appear on multiple search engines. Banner advertising placements are also available throughout the site.

Advertisers have 24/7 access to their account to view performance statistics, edit their business profile and update billing information as well as access to free business tools including forms, contracts and guides. Marketing advisors are also available to help advertisers optimize their campaigns. CityWaboo.com uses a flat-fee pricing model rather than a pay-per-click model, so advertisers know exactly how much they are spending and do not have to be concerned with click-through fraud.

Differing from similar sites, CityWaboo.com will feature user-generated editorials and city guides from street teams, instead of reviews and articles from paid journalists. “We’re trying to give people a real view of what’s going on in their city,” said Armen Akopyan, co-founder of CityWaboo.com.

CityWaboo.com features adaptive search technology and tagging association, which allows visitors to search by emotional-based, everyday phrases such as “best place to get sushi” instead of “sushi restaurants.” Business listings include comprehensive and up-to-date information including contact information, business hours, pictures, maps, driving directions, special discounts, a user-generated ratings and reviews system and a send-to-phone feature allowing visitors to text a business listing to their cell phone. Additionally, each page of the Web site is personalized to the user’s city and state.

Other services and tools include free event postings, real estate listings powered by Realtor.com, news and weather, jobs powered by CareerBuilder.com and free classified ads.

CityWaboo.com is a community resource site that brings local businesses and residents together. The company’s mission is to provide a valuable resource tool for communities nationwide while offering businesses affordable and cost-effective online advertising options. CityWaboo.com features a searchable business directory with up-to-date information on millions of businesses nationwide, event postings, real estate listings, news, weather, a job search engine and free classified ads. CityWaboo is based in Burbank, Calif. More information is available at www.CityWaboo.com.

Yahoo Finance

It’s a city . . . it’s a waboo . . . it’s CityWaboo! No, I don’t have a clue what the name means, but a new “community resource site” has launched in beta.

Eduard Arakelyan, a co-founder of CityWaboo, explained what he intends to do with the site. “Our goal is to provide communities with a valuable resource tool to quickly find information while also helping businesses build their customer base with local and national exposure,” Arakelyan wrote in a statement.

And that customer base has the potential to become quite wide - CityWaboo covers all sorts of ground. Yellow pages, news, events, jobs (courtesy of CareerBuilder.com), classifieds, weather, real estate (powered by Realtor.com), maps, and a “business corner” - pretty much every aspect of the community is there.

Well, everything except the community itself, that is. Like most newer sites, CityWaboo’s user population is a little lacking. Yet the “beta” tag is an encouraging sign - the CityWaboo team is not trying to foist this off as a finished product - and as a press release stated, “Visitors can now browse CityWaboo.com and try key features and services while the site’s functionality is continuously tested and improved.”

Business might do well to get their names on the site during this period, considering that “basic business listings” are free. “Enhanced packages” do have a price tag, though - $39.95 per month.

And on one other slightly discouraging note, I’ve discovered a possible meaning for CityWaboo. “Waboo,” by itself, at least, means “Internet (Web) taboo,” according to Urban Dictionary.

UPDATE: As explained by Eduard Arakelyan in an email to WebProNews, CityWaboo is “a name that we chose to stimulate conversation. For example turn to your co worker right now and say CityWaboo, the first sentence out of his or her mouth would be City What!? That is exactly what we want people’s reaction to be. This gives us a chance to embed the site name right from the get go.”

Submitted by Doug Caverly
Webpronews.com