Yelp seeing real success with augmented reality

Music

>> Several -- I guess it's now been several months ago, we launched Monocle, which was another big boost for us. And so Monocle is this feature that is augmented reality, leverages augmented reality, and essentially you can hold it up when you're walking down the street, and it will show you the businesses that are in front of you and show the star rating, you can just tap on it, and then it pulls up the businesses page. And so we didn't really realize that would be such a big deal. When we prototyped it and put it in there, it was buried initially as an Easter egg. But once it got out there, it was just a -- quite a marketing force.

>> But wasn't it kind of a -- it was a story of the tail wagging the dog, in this case?

>> Yes, the interesting story behind how Monocle came about was we had a -- I remember having a -- we had a conversation in the office -- it was a couple of engineers, myself -- about wouldn't it be amazing if you could just walk up to a business and hold up your phone, point it at the business, and it would say this is the star rating before you walked in. You didn't have to do anything; it was sort of hands-free, and you could just walk down the street with that. So it's kind of a neat vision that were just tossing around, and somehow that conversation leaked out. And soon after -- a couple of days after, I think, Scoble had a poster, a tweet, might have been on FriendFeed, actually, where he said, "Yelp is going to come up with -- or is working on the most incredible future ever involving the compass," and I don't know if he mentioned augmented reality or not. But we hadn't actually started on anything, and we weren't building anything; we just had this discussion. And so then, actually an intern of ours got real excited and decided he would prototyped it and see if it could be done. And so we started working on it, and once he showed us a working prototype, we were definitely wowed, but we thought, "You know, it's an early technology, it's a little rough, our location data isn't that accurate. Maybe it -- it might not be that useful, but it all -- it is awfully cool. So why don't we bury it as an Easter egg, you know, intern, if you can get it done." And so it gave him a good challenge, and he plugged away on it for, I don't know, a month or so, and we were able to get it into our release. And then, of course, the release came out, word got out about the Easter egg, and it just blow up on us. It was sort of beyond our expectations; we had no idea.

>> And that boosted your traffic up by like 50%?

>> Yeah, I think mobile traffic rose by like 40 or 50%. And it really was just -- it wasn't just sort of an up and down; it was, you know, a pop and sort of sustained.

>> Yeah, I really see the -- I mean, the augmented reality on the phone is just, you know, what satellite maps were -- or satellite imagery was back in 2005 where it's the new view, you need to have it there and...

>> Yeah. I mean, it looks really cool, and I think it'll get better and better. I think, you know, there is a lot of hype around it, like the technology is still early. It's probably a few years off before we have really, really practical applications. I think it is useful, but it's, you know, it's still something that I think early adopters get a huge kick out of, but I don't know that it'll go mainstream for a little while.

Music

==== Transcribed by Automatic Sync Technologies ====