For example: http://glio.com/local/cafe-com-letras-leblon-rio-de-janeiro
"The atmosphere itself is cool and they offer pcs for accessing the Internet, thus why it's highly visited by tourists. They offer sandwiches, coffee and alcoholic drinks. Unfortunately, you have to pay a fee to use the pc and R$10/hour to use wi-fi."
At least you know it's not a paid advert/comment just to get the site rolling.
As an aside, there really needs to be more places in Rio that offer free wi-fi and outlets. It's ridiculous how few places have either.
Also, R$10/hr (US$4.30/hr) to use wi-fi is really high, but we're talking about the posh Leblon, so...
Until a few weeks ago we were invite-only, and now we're going to test a few approaches and see what makes more sense to keep content quality high (that's why we require all users to be Facebook-authenticated) and at the same time make users happy.
Thanks again.
There are a lot of interesting statistics on Brazil's Facebook usage here (http://www.quintly.com/blog/2013/03/facebook-country-statist...).
Essentially, they say that Brazil is overall second in number of Facebook users and that as of March 35% of people are on the service (vs 50.76% in the US.) Unfortunately, the post doesn't explicitly say what the ranking is for the per capita percentage, which would be most interesting for this thread.
Also, they have almost doubled the number of users over a one year period (which started a little after Facebook surpassed Orkut [which has always been famous for having a huge Brazillian presence.])
But if I was planning to make a site for reviews, I would not be putting barriers just to view it...
disclaimer: I don't have a facebook account...
Not sure how the business managed to get these reviews "hidden". You could reveal them in the desktop interface but they didn't exist at all through the android app. After all the recent "Yelp mafia" stories, I assume that you can pay yelp to hide reviews?
A friend showed me how to use Dianping (the Yelp of China) which has no english UI or reviews, and very little use of iconography in the category selection. Once a friend showed me how to sort by avg review, price, distance, etc, just browsing pictures I was able to find somewhere I was interested in going in a few minutes.
now i use foursquare in the US, even though the reviews are less abundant, the paid reviews (just read _any_ mechanic review in yelp!) are almost nowhere to be found.
yelp is just blind trying to monetize US and digging it's grave.
The likely other market would be Belo Horizonte, since RJ-SP-BH are where most of the startups [1], and presumably early adopters, are. 1 - Brazil's Crunchbase http://www.startupbase.net/
By the way, here's Glio's numbers (translated)
- 75% of the published reviews are positive - 4/5 stars
- 450 people on average read each review
- 400,000 consumers have already used Glio
- 1 million page views
- 4 million characters written in user reviews
And Belo Horizonte is for sure one of the most promising next cities where Glio's product can be really useful.
By the way, I've got to update the About page numbers, those are from a while ago.
Thanks a lot for the feedback.
Just an idea or two, btw. Glio could make a video, like the 'about' page one, for each city, showing people interacting with the city you're rolling out in. With 4G being installed, at least in the World Cup cities, it will be a boon for your service.
Another suggestion, in case it's not already a feature of Glio, is to implement ReclameAqui's company response ability (Resposta da Empresa/Reclamações Atendidas), at least privately so a company can respond to negative reviews and invite the user to come again to try them out and perhaps change their mind/review.
Well, geez, no crap Sherlock. There will be one dominant incumbent once someone reaches that position (even though 4sq looks like it's ahead of the competition). Kekanto was selling themselves as the "Yelp of Brazil" as well.
When reading about Brazilian startups I can smell the naivety from a distance. Somethings may be lost in translation as well (their english is good, but not that good). But it's ok, foreign investors are also naive (in some aspects and better at others)
That being said, all the best. Their tone on the website still feels too formal in some phrases and informal in others, getting the right tone and rhythm takes some time
I was very impressed by the winners of the Latam Startup Challenge (4pets in particular, though Zoop was very ambitious too).
look really similar to what I'm building :( though we're focusing on the location-based category search part rather than on the reviews part, and I'm in Uruguay, not Brazil.
"local" search and discovery is something Google hasn't conquered yet, at least for my country.
There's also the local discounts angle Foursquare tried to do.
Our very shallow customer discovery so far yelded a few insights on what to do differently :) . Also, I wonder where Glio will get its data from.
This is something that is needed, good luck to Glio :)
