Dianping Is Aiming At Local Business Review And Search

Written by Tangos on April 10, 2006
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DianpingDianping(大众点评网, its domain name “dianping” means review in Chinese), a very popular restaurants review site, released its new version last weekend.

The biggest change of this new version is that Dianping expand its reviews from restaurants to all kinds of local business, such as night club, beauty and spa, and shops. In one word, Dianping is developing into a China’s Yelp.

In this new version, I like the new feature of sort reviews by contact. When you read reviews of any business, the reviews by your contacts, if any, will show first. That’s great, I can read the reviews by people I know and trust first, it helps us to filter them when users make more and more reviews.

Some other new functions include flickr-like groups, tagging, ajax application, and customizeable personal page. The map integration will also be added in recent days.

Dianping was founded in 2003 by Zhang Tao, a Wharton School MBA. It is said to have reviews on 73,314 restaurants by its around 600,000 register users by the end of 2005. Dianping generates revenue from its reviews offline publishing business and VIP card affiliation fee from restaurants. Now, Dianping also earn revenues from mobile searching service.

Recently, Dianping also raised funding from Sequoia China, no details on the amount was disclosed so far.

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