Hoi! We’re excited to announce that today we’ve launched the Dutch version of Tupalo.com! As of today, our Dutch visitors are able to discover, rate and review their favorite local businesses around the Netherlands, starting off with tens of thousands of restaurants in Amsterdam and the rest of the country.
Not only are we launching our Dutch language version throughout the Netherlands, but we’re also doing it with the support of De Telefoongids BV, our strategic data partner in the Netherlands.
In addition, we’ve rolled out signup integration with Hyves.nl, the largest social network in the Netherlands, using the Hyves API support for OAuth! Our new Dutch friends can now easily join up to Tupalo.com using just their Hyves account, of which about a third of the population of the Netherlands are members of.
Update
In addition to rolling out in the Netherlands, we’ve also updated our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy
Those updates are as follows:
We have moved our Terms and Privacy Policy to a new content management system.
We’ve added HEROLD Business Data GmbH (AT) and Glam Media / Brash Media (US, UK, DE, FR, JP) as advertisers who, in addition to Google and Doubleclick serve advertising on Tupalo.com
We’ve added new sections where users accept to use Tupalo.com Feeds or Tupalo.com Widgets for personal usage only, not for commercial usage, such as the creation of a competing product or service.
We’ve added a section where users accept that they will not scrape, poll, copy or reuse Tupalo.com business listings data in order to build a commercial product consisting of sorted business listings.
Improved the readability and added a clearer section containing definitions of the terms used in our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
As of Today, you can add your Tupalo.com account as a service in your My Name is E cards! When logged in at My Name is E and editing your social services, you’ll now see a shiny new option for Tupalo, in addition to other newcomers Foursquare, Plurk and The Beehance Network!
“E” (as it’s lovingly referred to), enables you to collect your social (Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and now Tupalo.com!), personal and business contacts in one spot and share them in real life via a multitude of platforms, such as mobile, email, web, iPhone (and Android and Blackberry) and the My Name is E Connecter, a nifty little USB dongle, which you can buy directly from E.
In April, the Dutch startup was announced as the winner of the Next Web startup challenge, a well deserved honor in our opinion, as we’re more than happy with replacing paper business cards with a contact rich My Name is E-card. Need to know more, here’s a quick introduction to E on the iPhone.
We’re happy to announce the launch of our new Twitter integration, giving new users to Tupalo.com the ability to easily register to rate and review their favorite local businesses using only their Twitter account credentials. Using Twitter’s excellent OAuth implementation, we’ve rolled out our new login/signup bar for new guests, allowing them the option of registering directly with Tupalo.com, or logging in using their existing Twitter credentials.
In addition to our signup integration, we’re continuing to improve our deeper integration with Twitter, giving visitors the ability to tweet directly from our business listings, in addition to feeding all new reviews out to our Twitter feed.
It’s been a long time coming but Today we’re happy to deploy the first version of our new search experience on Tupalo.com! With a focus on improving the usability of our search and discovery experience, our new search drops the traditional “2 field” way of approaching local search queries and sees us combining both fields into one powerful and usable entry field.
We’re still rolling out updates and improvements, but we’re all extremely excited to hear your feedback and ideas for improving the search experience even further on Tupalo.com and Tupalo.com Austria.
Today we are announcing an often requested and long awaited awesome feature which gives users the chance to tweet their reviews. With the rise of twitter we at Tupalo.com see that a strong connection between our Application and Twitter as a distribution service is crucial. However we didn’t want to simply implement some Tweetmeme button but do our own thing. When checking the box you are being redirected to twitter.com where you need to be logged in to tweet this.
This gives your reviews another chance to distribute and share what you think of certain spots. Give it and try and let us know if you like it.
Glam Media, the pioneering vertical advertising network, Today launched Brash Germany, their premium vertical ad and content network targeting male demographics. Featured in the launch was social yellow pages startup, Tupalo.com, a premium launch partner included in Brash’s ”Food and Drink” category, joining 25 other top launch partners, including fellow Vienna startup and good pals of ours, Kununu.com.
Tupalo.com is now a proud premium publisher in the Glam Media and Brash family in the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan, working together with brands such as T-Mobile, HP, Suzuki and many more premium names.
Techcrunch Europe yesterday announced their Techcrunch Europas award nominees, and not only is Tupalo.com nominated for Best Web Application Or Service, but we’re joined in the nominations by 3 other excellent Vienna-based startups!
In addition, our friends at Soup.io (Best Bootstrapped Startup, Less Than 3 Years Old), tripwolf (Best Web Application Or Service) and Vooch (Best Bootstrapped Startup, Less Than 3 Years Old) have also been nominated, which gives Vienna a pretty strong showing at this years’ Europas awards!
We’ve got a little but really nifty feature for you out there, which we deployed today – and it’s already real fun using it. Ever thought of writing a blog post on some cool bar or so? Then, that’s the right tool for you. You can pinpoint any spot on Tupalo within your blog posts. But let me give you an example:
Well, yesterday we had great lunch at Il Sestante and enjoyed it.
Woop, there it is. We call them Tupalinks – a beautiful blend of Permalinks and Tupalo Icons. When you go to a spot page you’ll see a little box in the right sidebar with an embedable code. Just copy and paste this code anywhere on the Internet and you’ll be able to paste any spot anywhere on the Web. This should make it easy for you to share your most loved spots around the planet wherever you want. The Icon in front of the respective spot is obviously corresponding to what type of spot it its. Just give it a try and you’ll see that it graphically enhances your i.e. blog posts, however doesn’t mess up it’s text flow.
We’re excited to announce a strategic partnership and round of investment with Austria’s leading publisher of yellow page data and directories, HEROLD Business Data.
What does this mean?
We will still continue as the lightweight, independent company we’ve always been, only we’ll be a few more people twisting and turning all the knobs (keep an eye on our jobs page in the near future).
Expect some aggressive moves forward with product and features as we devote more resources to incorporating all of the great feedback we continually receive from our users and moving the platform forward, more quickly. In addition expect to see hundreds of thousands more Austrian business listings on Tupalo.com and plan on seeing more Tupalo.com related activities in and around the cities of Austria, as we announce more partnerships, community events and other exciting goodies for our users old and new.
For local business owners, with HEROLD as a strategic partner, we’ll be able to work together to provide restaurants, cafes, hotels, salons and more local businesses and services in Austria, additional ways of marketing their brands by utilizing user-generated content and the social graph, expanding on the ways they already market their business online with HEROLD.
We’re very excited about the news Today and want to thank all of our dedicated users who have been Tupaleros since the very beginning, we look forward to meeting you all in person at Tupalo.com meetups and events around Austria in the very near future.
Die Presse, one of Austria’s leading press outlets, has graciously chosen Tupalo.com as their culture tip of the week, telling their readers how the social yellow pages community helps them discover local shops, local businesses and more in their neighborhood using reviews and photos.
We already knew that of course, but we’re very excited to have Die Presse’s Sunday readers now know that as well.
Tupalo.com launches in the Netherlands with support from De Telefoongids BV (Update 1)
