Startups & Venture Capital
BlockAvenue: Taking it to the streets
Premium content from Boston Business Journal by Taryn Plumb, Special to the Journal
Friday, October 5, 2012
W. Marc Bernsau
The Web is the ultimate equalizer: Any one of us can take to our
keyboards to review restaurants, hotels, stores, books, movies, TV
shows, news articles and consumer products.
But what about when it comes to one of the most important aspects of our lives: Our streets, blocks and neighborhoods? Where can we find — or lend our expertise to, or air our grievances about — the hidden-away spots and the nitty-gritty details, the areas to hit and the ones to avoid?
This is the “lifestyle platform” that Cambridge-based BlockAvenue aims to create, by bringing the Yelp and TripAdvisor review concept down to the street-by-street level.
Launched in beta on Sept. 20, the company’s Web platform aggregates 50 million data points — from transit options, to crime stats, to home values, to amenities — and integrates them onto a map with user-based reviews, scores and testimonials, to create a true picture (good, bad, or neutral) of a given neighborhood.
“Some really important decisions are made around location,” said BlockAvenue founder and CEO Anthony Longo, also the founder of Web-based real estate broker Condo Domain, acquired by Better Homes Realty in August.
The goal of BlockAvenue is to bring “transparency” to that process, Longo said, by providing data on “anything and everything that makes up a location, that creates the value of that location.”
In the works since December 2011, the site is most complete in metro areas of Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., but users and demand are expected to broaden that swath over the coming weeks and months.
Longo and his backers have no doubt about the appetite for such a site.
“There’s a lot of fragmented data out there,” said PJ Solomon, general partner of seed-stage investing and consulting firm Second & Fourth, which is advising BlockAvenue on product, monetization and growth strategies. “There’s nothing like it out there.”
The site faces competition from sites such as StreetAdvisor, but Longo said the site has seen an “overwhelming” response so far, with about 400 searches per minute on its launch day.
BlockAvenue employs four full-time staffers and is based at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. The startup has raised $300,000 in seed funding from angel investors — $100,000 of that in its first week of launching. The goal is to move forward with a “sizable” Series A round by year’s end, Longo said.
How the site works: Users type in a location, and are brought to a map with different-colored pinpoints — indicating spots of interest such as stores and restaurants, as well as the addresses of registered sex offenders — and an overall neighborhood rating ranging from “A” to “F.” Zooming in closer shows reviews and comments; or users can also simply give a location a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”
“That’s the real value: The tiny tidbits, the one sentence blurbs that people are going to write,” Longo said.
Looking ahead, the company aims to gain profitability by eventually selling B2B products, licensing its data and working ad components into the website. An immediate goal is to create a mobile platform and “get it on everybody’s iPhones,” Longo said, while longer-term plans are to integrate more with social networks and to access “more and better” data.
Ultimately, Longo pointed to the site’s potentially wider implications.
“Over time we’ll be able to see trends on what makes neighborhoods good and what makes them bad,” said Longo — potentially giving insights on how to improve the worse-off neighborhoods.
Original story link here.
But what about when it comes to one of the most important aspects of our lives: Our streets, blocks and neighborhoods? Where can we find — or lend our expertise to, or air our grievances about — the hidden-away spots and the nitty-gritty details, the areas to hit and the ones to avoid?
This is the “lifestyle platform” that Cambridge-based BlockAvenue aims to create, by bringing the Yelp and TripAdvisor review concept down to the street-by-street level.
Launched in beta on Sept. 20, the company’s Web platform aggregates 50 million data points — from transit options, to crime stats, to home values, to amenities — and integrates them onto a map with user-based reviews, scores and testimonials, to create a true picture (good, bad, or neutral) of a given neighborhood.
“Some really important decisions are made around location,” said BlockAvenue founder and CEO Anthony Longo, also the founder of Web-based real estate broker Condo Domain, acquired by Better Homes Realty in August.
The goal of BlockAvenue is to bring “transparency” to that process, Longo said, by providing data on “anything and everything that makes up a location, that creates the value of that location.”
In the works since December 2011, the site is most complete in metro areas of Boston, New York and Washington, D.C., but users and demand are expected to broaden that swath over the coming weeks and months.
Longo and his backers have no doubt about the appetite for such a site.
“There’s a lot of fragmented data out there,” said PJ Solomon, general partner of seed-stage investing and consulting firm Second & Fourth, which is advising BlockAvenue on product, monetization and growth strategies. “There’s nothing like it out there.”
The site faces competition from sites such as StreetAdvisor, but Longo said the site has seen an “overwhelming” response so far, with about 400 searches per minute on its launch day.
BlockAvenue employs four full-time staffers and is based at Dogpatch Labs in Cambridge. The startup has raised $300,000 in seed funding from angel investors — $100,000 of that in its first week of launching. The goal is to move forward with a “sizable” Series A round by year’s end, Longo said.
How the site works: Users type in a location, and are brought to a map with different-colored pinpoints — indicating spots of interest such as stores and restaurants, as well as the addresses of registered sex offenders — and an overall neighborhood rating ranging from “A” to “F.” Zooming in closer shows reviews and comments; or users can also simply give a location a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.”
“That’s the real value: The tiny tidbits, the one sentence blurbs that people are going to write,” Longo said.
Looking ahead, the company aims to gain profitability by eventually selling B2B products, licensing its data and working ad components into the website. An immediate goal is to create a mobile platform and “get it on everybody’s iPhones,” Longo said, while longer-term plans are to integrate more with social networks and to access “more and better” data.
Ultimately, Longo pointed to the site’s potentially wider implications.
“Over time we’ll be able to see trends on what makes neighborhoods good and what makes them bad,” said Longo — potentially giving insights on how to improve the worse-off neighborhoods.
Original story link here.
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