I guess you compete with some big proprietary silos, but are there othere smaller services that do what you do? How are you better?

Hi Mick,

I guess one our main diffrentiators is that reviewing is central to our site, whereas it is secondary for a large number of other sites that we have looked at. In addition, we have spent a significant amount of our time creating our reviewing platform (with some key features yet to be implemented).  One of the key features is our weighted reviewing system:

Why weight reviews?

We felt that a simple single score was not accurate enough, but existing multiple criteria rating systems on most existing sites were not flexible enough to handle any type of business.  Below are the factors we considered...

Different rating criteria depending on the business type
Not all businesses are the same and reviews should reflect that.  Punctuality and workmanship may be relevant to a mobile plumber, but not a child care centre.  To refine this concept further we will also dynamically rank these in order of which criteria users think is more important.

Business' review history
Different businesses in the same industry have different competitive advantages.  They might be a lower price point with more basic customer service, or they might be a high end or niche provider which provides more intensive customer service.  Realistically, very few businesses will acheive great intensive customer service and great value.  Most reviewing systems will tax those that don't acheive both, but our weighting system will overcome this inaccuracy.

Users review history
Different users have different expectations and we analyse a few factors in the review history to accurately weight one review in the sea of others.

Age of the review
There are many internal (new staff, managers, owners, rennovations, rebranding) and external (competition, legislation) factors that can render an older review irrelevant.  Over time the importance of a review will diminish which keeps the weighted overall score more accurate.

Regarding competition.. some other sites in this space: 

1) Word of Web: http://www.wordofweb.com.au/ 

2) Total travel http://www.totaltravel.com.au/ - see 'Recent reviews', halfway down page, right hand column.

3) Cheap Drinks http://www.cheapdrinks.com.au/sydney_willoughby_Dan-Murphys.pub

and a large number of bar/restaurant type guides. 

4) Bizcom

ABN Search related Business comment site

http://www.bizcomrate.com.au/