paidContent - Sidewalk Being Revived by Citysearch, This Time As a Mobile Web App
This story was written by Rafat Ali.
Sidewalk.com is being revived again, this time as a mobile and Web app. Citysearch, part of IAC (NSDQ: IACI), has owned the domain for a while now, ever since Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) sold its stake in 1999 to then Ticketmaster-Citysearch, but the domain has been redirecting to Citysearch.com homepage for a while now. So it has decided to do the next new thing with it: build a local mobile app out of it, and is crowd-sourcing it, sort of: it is launching a contest for developers to build something that “focuses on making life easier, right here, right now”. From the FAQs, it wants a service that “offers real-time communication about what to do around any city,” meaning it should be a location-based service with social media elements in it.
The creator of the winning application will win a $10,000 prize, opportunity to develop and manage a new business venture with up to $1 million dollars in funding and receive an equity stake in the new Sidewalk.com venture. The equity stake is capped at 10 percent, according to the rules. Traffic to this app will be monetized through the Citysearch publishers network. The contest starts today and the winner will be judged and announced in September. A history of Sidewalk, here on CNET.
IAC ramped up its local strategy earlier this year, taking Citysearchs redesign out of beta and announcing a partnership with MySpace for MySpace Local. It has also bought two companies in the space: InsiderPages (in 2007) and UrbanSpoon (earlier this year). On the mobile app side, Citysearch has its own app, and of course Urbanspoon is a wildly popular mobile app on iPhone.
Interestingly, MSN, the other partner of yore in the original Sidewalk, has recently relaunched its own MSN City Guides, and also hired back Cyrus Krohn to lead the programming strategy for future MSN local efforts.
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By Rafat Ali