CitySquares, an online city guide and directory company based in Boston, has acquired the assets of Yokel, which provides online retail services and maintains a database of 2 million retailers. Terms weren’t disclosed. The combination should work well with CitySquares’ recent turn toward national/local operations.
Fees for Yokel, whose tagline is “all shopping, all local,” start at $7.95 a month. Retailers using the service get a free storefront, assorted marketing tools, and listings on search engines and on Yokel’s own shopping directory. The site was started by Scott Randall, former CEO of FairMarket, an early eBay competitor that later focused on B2B retail auctions. Randall will work with CitySquares as a consultant.
According to The Boston Business Journal, CitySquares, which has some backing by Mark Cuban and Jonathan Kraft (i.e., the family behind Gillette), says it expects to be cash flow positive in 90 days and will be hiring again after weathering the tough climate of 2009.
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This came in from CitySquares CEO Ben Saren…
Hi Peter, thanks for posting this. Nice to talk to you this morning. I’m really excited about this acquisition and equally excited about having Scott Randall involved. I’ve had the pleasure of knowing Scott for a few years now and arriving at this point is the result of that synergy. We plan to maintain the integrity of the Yokel brand and website and offering. We also plan on dusting the code off and getting our hands in there and leveraging it for its core purpose, but also for other types of content aggregation on CitySquares – shall I say, less consumer/business related content and more real-world community content. We’ve got a lot to do in the next few months. Also, the Local Product Search opportunity still seems so nascent to me so I can’t but feel like we have a good jump on it. We’re bouncing a few other ideas around, and welcome anyone’s perspectives on local product search, SMB retail etc etc.
Thanks again Peter! See you in March.