Palo Alto-based Genie Town launches this morning. They’re trying to crack the local services nut - a huge market, but one that a lot of the massive guys are eyeing, too. The company states they’re addressing the long tail of local services. The GenieTown site allows local service providers (plumbers, dentists, whatever) to put up […]

Palo Alto-based Genie Town launches this morning. They’re trying to crack the local services nut - a huge market, but one that a lot of the big guys are eyeing, too.

The company states they are addressing the long tail of local services. The GenieTown site grants local service providers (plumbers, dentists, whatever) to put up a web presence. Users looking for providers can find them, based on their location and user rating.

The site competes on one end with services like (gulp) Google Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp and of course the Yellow Pages (both on the web and off). All of those services are great places to find local service providers.

Eventually GenieTown states they’ll integrate more closely with service providers to coordinate calendars and booking systems. At that point they’ll run into another group of competitors, including recently funded Liberysy.

If they are going to be successful in both carving out a niche and avoiding all those competitors, they’ll need to quickly get a lot of those service providers to begin using their service. To concentrate their efforts they’re rolling out the Bay Area only for now - service providers and users from anywhere can use the service, but the company will only market locally. They’ll grow from there.

And GenieTown is also trying to engage with users on more than just making introductions. The smartest part of the service, in my thought, is a Q&A area that’ll do very will with search engine optimization.

The company has raised $2 million in a first round of funding from a number of angel investors, including Stanford professors Hassan Chafi (also the CEO) and Kunle Olukotun.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Via [TechCrunch]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 5:20 pm and is filed under Company and Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.