BView

Archive for the ‘Product Updates’ Category

Bookingbug relaunches, working with BView

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Bookingbug, the web booking service, has just exited their Beta phase and I am happy to say that we will be working with them to get vouchers created on the Bookingbug platform indexed and included within the BView distribution network and APIs.

The beauty of the Bookingbug service is that their online bookings interface is full widgetised i.e. if you use Bookingbug to manage your bookings online you can put the booking widget on every website you use to promote your business from social sites to directories and more.

Look out for vouchers and offers appearing on BView with a “book now” link.

Tags: bookingbug, online booking
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iPhone app

Monday, September 28th, 2009

I am happy to say that the first two iPhone apps using the BView API are now live. First up is Local Sale Finder which is available to download here followed closely by  London Offers (built by the good people from Rippll) which is available to download here.

The BView API is free for anyone to use and allows you to use the BView vouchers, sales & offers data base on your own application or website.  Go get a key and mash it up to your heart’s content.

Tags: api, geolocation, iphone, vouchers
Posted in Announcements, Business, Product Updates | Comments Off

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 If you find some out of date details for a business, use the “Edit” links on their listing to update name, address, telephone number and website.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 »

Swish New Search

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

As I mentioned in my previous post, a new version of BView was launched last week. The most obvious changes were to our search results pages; we decided they looked a bit too plain so decided to start making use of some of the excellent content contributed by our users:

1. If a business has been reviewed or has pictures added to its profile, we’re including them in the results and we’ve tweaked the sorting options to try and make it easier to find the best result. We also made the map bigger to make it easier to use.
2. Each town and classification now allows you to suggest a description that we should display at the top of the page. Check out the description Joy W sent us about Sheffield. We’ll be slowly adding these in ourselves, but if you’re an expert on a particular town or classification, please send something in! You can also suggest links to other relevant sites. Look on the right hand side of Brighton’s hub page. It now has links to their local theatre, Royal pavilion and football club. Why not pick out something you know and send us over a paragraph of text, plus some links, so that others can share in your insider knowledge?

As ever, if you’ve got any comments or suggestions for BView, please get in touch, and don’t forget that throughout July we’re rewarding our users with £10 of Amazon vouchers for their reviews*.

*See the BView rewards page for terms and conditions.

That’s all for now… please keep those reviews coming.

Laters.

Tags: hubs, release, search
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Release 2.0

Thursday, June 5th, 2008

We’re always working on ways to make BView.co.uk better, and this week we’ve released a load of great new stuff for you (as the eagle-eyed will have already noticed!)

The main new features in this release include an onsite inbox for privately messaging other users and a Post board for public messages. The post board has replaced the blog function (a decision made thanks to your feedback!) Both the inbox and post board can be found on users profiles.

We’ve also given the profile pages a makeover and added an all new “I Work at” section allowing you to link yourself to your employer and tell people what you do. This will eventually help you build your networks with other users. Check out my profile to see it all in action, and while you’re there, why not leave a message on my post board or contact me and say hello?

Feedback also suggested there wasn’t a lot of love for compliments, so we’ve simplified them to Votes – don’t worry, compliments for your review have still been counted.

From these recent changes you can see that your feedback helps us to get the right changes made to BView, so keep in touch.

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The BView Empire

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

After a successful launch last Monday, BView is now in flight! Every day new people, businesses, customers are discovering the benefits of using BView. At the moment the community is growing slowly but surely: like all great empires, Rome wasn’t built in a day!

As you may have noticed, one of the significant changes in the latest release was the removal of age/sex from users profiles. This decision was based on your feedback and the realisation that this information is not necessarily important to people in our community. Age maybe important for those hanging out in Myspace or Facebook but for professional and business networks we think this is not important for now.

As the web evolves privacy of information becomes an increasingly hot topic, especially in the world of social networking. Readers won’t need to be reminded of the threats that giving out too much personal information can have (data theft etc) and people often don’t like organisations owning this data. BView members can rest-assured we do not pass personal info onto third parties.

It goes without saying that ambitions at BView are high and we have lots of great plans for future development.

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BView 1.0

Sunday, March 9th, 2008

We’ve just spent the last few days testing, testing and retesting to make sure the site is as good as it can be for Monday when we make a full release. For those of you who haven’t read about BView already, here’s quick intro:

• BView is a local (and national) business search engine (think Yell.com on steroids)
• We believe that we can change the way businesses do business with their customers
• BView allows businesses to manage their profile, and customers to review their experiences
• We’ve partnered with Equifax to show financial stability scores for over 1.5m UK businesses for free for the first time ever

We’d love to hear your feedback on everything on the site from new feature suggestions to what type of data you’d like us to add next. What we offer in return is the ability to review and share your opinions of the businesses you’ve dealt with in the past and the ability to research businesses you are considering working with.

Let’s make doing business with UK businesses easier, faster and more rewarding.

Tags: businesses, BView, Equifax, Launch
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