Category: Announcements

Archive for the ‘Announcements’ Category

BView's iPhone winner

Thursday, November 6th, 2008

We’ve had a phenomenal response for the iPhone prize draw that ran between September and October. Every BView member who wrote a review during that time was allocated a ticket and creating over 3000 tickets was not a light task! Instead of letting the system randomise the winner, we decided to draw the winning ticket the traditional way and made our own rather festive looking basket!

After fighting over who should pick the winner, Olu O took charge.

I get to hold the basket while Olu picks the winner! It's team work!

Guess who had lady luck on their side yesterday?

The iPhone winner!

Congratulations to Debbie Smith from Dunfermline for writing her way to a sleek new iPhone! Debbie has written some great reviews of businesses local to her and you can view Debbie’s profile on BView. She enjoys music, making friends and writing- so why not post her a little hello on her postboard?

November’s rewards

Don’t worry if you didn’t win or if you missed October’s competitions! This month we’re looking out for Local Experts and Community Champions. You can earn up to £100 by contributing towards the BView community and sharing your knowledge of businesses local to you. For more information on how it works, read our rewards page.

Tags: BView, Debbie Smith, Dunfermline, iphone, reviews, rewards
Posted in Announcements, Competitions | Comments Off

Another helping hand

Monday, October 27th, 2008

Since BView launched back in March our community has expanded faster than we could have imagined – and we’ve trying our hardest to focus on what matters most: our members.

To make sure that each and every one of you gets the attention you deserve I’m happy to introduce you all to Samina H – the newest addition to the BView team. Sam will be working alongside me to help keep all you BViewer’s up to speed. Please give her big welcome – I know she’s keen to get stuck in and help you all get the best out of BView.

I know Sam is really interested to hear from you all and to find out a bit more about what you think would make BView a better place – so get in touch and let her know.

Our developers are just putting the finishing touches on to the latest BView features, and Sam will be telling you all more about that just as soon as we’ve ironed out the last few bugs (well, I hope they’re the last few anyway). I’m not allowed to tell you what the new features are yet, but I reckon you might just like them…

Laters.

Simon
(Samina says “hi” too)

Tags: BView, community, News, team
Posted in Announcements, News | Comments Off

Release 5.0 New Features – Tags

Friday, September 26th, 2008

Tagging, as any up and coming graffiti artist knows, is the process of adding relevant slogans to a wall or in our case a business listing. We decided that tagging would be a great addition to BView and this Thursday it was unleashed.

Tags are always associated with a particular business and can be added either when you write a review, or separately when you edit the business. Kat and I have added a video below showing you how to add tags. A tag cloud will be shown for every business, giving you a quick summary of what people think, and also against a user showing you what tags they have added.

Additionally, when you search for a business using the “what” field, as well as relevant categories you will be shown all businesses tagged with your search phrase. For example, searching for “ice cream” will show not only all ice cream parlours, but also all businesses tagged with “ice cream”.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxZr7_punpg]

Tags: bview has tags, tag, tagged, tagging, tags
Posted in Announcements, Features, News | 3 Comments »

Cake 1.0 is over. Now releasing Cake 2.0

Wednesday, September 10th, 2008

Hi there. It’s your friendly neighbourhood kat here, Thanks for all your entries to our first site-wide cake competition! The winner is…

Joy W from Sheffield for her review of Gullivers Eco Park Ltd entitled, “Not for genuine Lilliputians (toddlers)”!

Loved the title, and you can really sense Joy’s rage at her little ones being slightly too tall to fit under the 90cm restriction for getting in for free. She describes the venue beautifully, and goes through the entire park, describing eating and toilet facilities. Great review Joy!

In close second, we have Kelly R from Newbury!

She wrote a review entitled, “Definitely not exhausting going here!” of Ats Euromaster Ltd. I loved her ‘car pun’ in the title, and it is an extremely well written, and extraordinarily detailed review. She tells you what products they sell, how the service was, and by the end of reading it, you are left feeling as grateful as her for the excellent service!

Hope you enjoy your cake, Joy! (and Kelly, I will be sending you a little prize in the post soon as well! Hopefully both will take some photos so we can show them to the rest of you.)

And now for next month…

Write your reviews of Animals!

That’s right, write anything about animals. It could be a pet store, farm, zoo, or just your local convenience store that happens to have a dog that sits on the counter. Here’s a little inspiration… Huw L’s review of Mudchute Park & Farm. As you can see, he has a great title, and, most importantly, fantastic photos and lots of personality in his review.

Contest closes on September 30th
You can enter as often as you like, but make sure you share your review with kathryn.neville@bview.com (or send me a link to your review)
I give extra marks for photos, witty titles, and dialogue in your text.
Make sure you give relevant information about the business as well!

If you need some more inspiration, I will send you photos of fuzzy animals. I’m quite partial to goats.

And, as promised in the email current bview members receive, here’s your animal haiku!

bah neigh rawr moo oink
Write your animal reviews
But please in English

P.S. If you can write a better haiku, post it on my wall!

Tags: animal reviews, cake, cake competition, cake contest, cake winners, competition, reviews
Posted in Announcements, Competitions | 1 Comment »

Win an iPhone 3G

Tuesday, September 9th, 2008

That’s right, we’ve got an 8Gb Apple iPhone 3G to give away to one lucky reviewer. I got myself one recently, and it’s brilliant – you’d be mad not to want one.

Every public review you write from now until midnight 31st October will get you an entry into our prize draw, and we’ll announce the winner around November 10th. The more reviews you write, the more chance you have of winning, so get writing!

Couldn’t be easier.

More details of the competition can be found on the BView site, and if you’ve got any questions please get in touch.

Tags: free iphone, iphone, iphone competition, prize
Posted in Announcements, Competitions | 1 Comment »

Edit any listing on BView

Thursday, August 28th, 2008

Yesterday evening we set loose the latest features on BView. It’s taken about a month of development work, but we’re finally there and we hope you’ll all like the new changes.

The main change I’ve been waiting to tell you about is pretty cool. We know there’s more of you than there is of us, so we’ve opened up our directory to the community to help keep it up to date. Getting into specifics, you can:

Edit business details for almost any BView listing. If you find some out of date details for a business, use the “Edit” links on their listing to update name, address, telephone number and website.
Add new businesses to the BView directory. It’s only take a couple of minutes, just click the “Add business” link displayed at the bottom of every page and follow the instructions.
Add pictures and YouTube videos to business profiles. To add them, use the buttons found on the “About” view of the business profile. It will only take a few seconds and will help make our listings even more useful for the community.
Add business descriptions that we’ll display on the “About” tab of a business. Have a look at the “About” tab of any business and follow the instructions, it doesn’t take long.

We only released it last night, and we’ve already had loads of businesses added and a few listings customised too.

If you’re need some help with any of these new features, just get in touch with me and I’ll help you out.

Tags: community, directory, user data editing, wiki
Posted in Announcements, News, Product Updates | 3 Comments »

On a Digital Mission

Wednesday, August 20th, 2008

We are really chuffed to have been chosen as one of the UK’s 20 hottest startups by Chinwag’s Digital Mission scheme and part and package of this involves us going to the Web2.0 Expo in September for a round of meetings and conferences.

For the full rundown on web mission head on over to The Guardian and Techcrunch .

We are joined on the top 20 list with:

Tags: BView, chinwag, digital mission, web2.0 expo
Posted in Announcements | Comments Off

The Cake is Not a Lie

Tuesday, August 12th, 2008

A couple of months back Kat, BView’s web designer, started giving away a free cake to the person in our office who wrote the best review of a selected topic for that week. The promise of free cake provoked a rapid review response, and so far the competitions have been a great success, and the reviews have been excellent.

Some of our previous winners include:

My review of Footlocker (and the cake, it was good)
Martin G’s review of Orange
Margaret M’s review of National Car Rental
James R’s review of the Gielgud Theatre

Everyone loves free cake, so Kat and I have decided that we’re going to extend this competition to the whole BView community. The BView member who Kat decides writes the best review of her chosen topic will get their very own cake.

Kat’s got pretty high standards (so she tells me) and will be judging the reviews she receives on these criteria:

Depth of detail
Humour and entertainment value
Relevant photos
Interesting title

The first topic Kat has chosen for the inaugural BView Community Cake Challenge is… Travel.

This is quite a broad category, so your review could be for travel agents, airlines, hotels, a train company or anything else you can think of. When you submit your review make sure you enter Kat’s e-mail address in the “E-mail this review to a friend” box (kathryn.neville@bview.com) or get in contact through her profile page.

You’ve got until midnight on Friday 5th September to submit your cake winning entry and you can enter as many times as you want. Kat will announce the winner on our blog the following week. If you win, we might even let you choose the cake… but that’s up to Kat. The top three reviewers also get a little prize from Kat – but I can’t tell you what, it’s a surprise.

It’s serious now, there’s a cake at stake. No excuses… get reviewing!

Posted in Announcements, Competitions | 2 Comments »

Refer your friends and get upto £50 to spend at Amazon

Friday, August 1st, 2008

BView’s Amazon rewards scheme was a massive success in July. And it’s definitely kept me busy! It’s really starting to show how useful and informative a committed community of reviewers can be. In July we had loads of new members, added thousands and thousands of reviews (I started counting to give you an exact figure, by lost my way and can’t face starting again), and we sent out thousands of pounds worth of Amazon vouchers.

We’ve still got plenty of space on BView and want our community to be even bigger (and better, naturally) than everywhere else, we’re well on our way to our goal of being the definitive source of business reviews in the UK but we won’t get there without your help. We want you to share BView with your friends and family. If they’re as well informed as our current members, then we’d love to have them on board!

To give you a bit of an incentive, we’ll reward you with a £10 Amazon voucher for every 5 new users you invite to BView who go on to write 20 qualifying reviews for un-reviewed businesses. Your new members get a £10 voucher for their reviewing efforts as well!

How does it work?

Login to your BView account and find the “Invite Friends” link on your “My Account” page
Choose where you want to invite your friends from. You can contact you friends directly through LinkedIn or Facebook, or access your webmail address book. If it’s easier, just enter their e-mail addresses directly
When they sign up by using the link in the invitation message, you’ll automatically be following each other. This way you’ll get updates when they write reviews (and prod them if they’re falling short of their voucher!)
When 5 users you invite hit the magic number of qualifying reviews (that’s 20), let me know and I’ll send out your voucher.
Head over to Amazon.co.uk and go shopping!

That’s all there is too it!

This offer is limited to 5 vouchers of £10 (£50 in total) and is valid in August only.

Posted in Announcements, Competitions | 1 Comment »

Going going (almost) gone

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Our superb Amazon rewards offer is almost at an end – just a couple of days left now. If you don’t know already (where have you been?) BView will reward you with a £10 Amazon voucher for your first 20 reviews. There’s even a chance of earning up to £50 if you’re one of our super reviewers. Our offer expires at midnight on Thursday 31st July, so make sure you’ve got your reviews in before then. Any reviews submitted after this won’t be counted, sorry.

Before you get writing, please take a couple of minutes to have a read through the full details (it’s important to make sure the reviews you write qualify) and then head on over to have a look at our top users page for a bit of inspiration.

Once your reviews are in, visit my page on BView and get in touch – I’ll check out your reviews and let you know when you’ll get your voucher.

That all there is to it – you know what to do…