A service like Yelp is just what Korea needs
Seoul, Korea (PRWEB) May 06, 2015
We are overwhelmed with information. So many products to choose from, so many services to pick. And so many opinions, from expert to amateur, from compensated to objective… how is one to choose?
These are the questions that are addressed by ReviewSee, a user-created mobile review platform that is being rolled out in Korea. By crowd-sourcing reviews across the whole gamut of services, ranging from restaurants to clinics to local government offices, ReviewSee aims to simplify the profusion of choices that consumers face today.
“Korea is a busy place, and I want to make life easier for people living here. It's all about simplicity and ease of use,” says Blake Song, CEO of ReviewSee.
ReviewSee shot to the top of Top New Apps category of Google Play upon its launch in January this year, and has been downloaded over 100,000 times since. Over 4,000 reviews have now been written by the users of the service. ReviewSee also boasts a database of more than 4.2 million businesses and institutions in Korea – 20% more than the national telephone directory and larger than any web-based portal - the work of months of web crawling using a bank of PCs.
To ensure objectivity, reviews that seem solicited are ruthlessly filtered by the company’s proprietary algorithm. “We need to make sure that users are getting timely, accurate information so they can make more informed choices. We filter reviews because solicited reviews make these choices more difficult,” says Song.
ReviewSee is benchmarking US-based Yelp and China’s Dianping which, according to the Wall Street Journal, has over 190 million users and was valued at $4 billion in an investment this year by a group of investors including Tencent Holdings. (Source: The Wall Street Journal, "China's Dianping valued at $4 Billion". April 2, 2015 - http://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-dianping-valued-at-4-billion-1427962959)
“We want to build out the most comprehensive platform in Korea to collect people’s experiences and help users to make informed choices. We need everyone’s input to accomplish this,” concludes Song.