GigPark Blog

A big congrats to Thomas Calvert who is the winner of a $2000 shopping spree at Best Buy!

Thomas, a REMAX real estate agent in Calgary, made 5 recommendations last week and so he had 5 chances to win.

On his shopping spree, Thomas plans on picking up camera equipment and a laptop to help with his business. He told us: “I’m so glad I joined GigPark!” We’re glad you joined too, Thomas :)

Thanks to everyone that entered the contest. Don’t forget, we’re running another contest right now to win $2000 cash! Like this past contest, every recommendation is another entry to win. This one ends on Monday, December 7th. Good luck!

Photo by atomicshark

It felt so good to give away a shopping spree at Best Buy and we’re still on a high from integrating GigPark’s recommendation functionality into Canpages, so we’re having another contest this week! This time we’re giving away $2000 in cold hard cash.

It’s so easy to participate! Here’s how it works:

• Every recommendation on Canpages or GigPark gives you another entry in the draw to win $2000 cash.
• Make a dozen recommendations, get a dozen chances to win.
• Contest ends on Monday, December 7th.
• Read all about the contest here.

Bonne chance!

Photo by guano

What’s the catch?
There’s no catch! Every recommendation you make between now and Monday (Nov 30th) automatically gives you another entry in the draw to win a $2000 shopping spree at Best Buy. We’re thrilled about the integration of GigPark’s recommendation functionality on Canpages, Canada’s fastest growing local search company, so we figured we should share the joy! All the contest details are here.

How do I enter?
Find a business on Canpages and recommend them.
Or, recommend any business on GigPark.

So if I make 20 valid recommendations, I get 20 chances to win?
Yes!

Why am I still reading this blog post?
You shouldn’t be. You should be recommending already. Good luck!!

Photo by seanaes

Things move quickly! When the celebrations finished, we got right to work on integrating GigPark with our new owner – Canpages. We’re excited to announce that today we released the first part of our integration.

Here is what’s new

1. Every business on Canpages can now be recommended – Here is an example of a business with recommendations. And here is an example of a business that hasn’t been recommended (yet!).
2. Recommendations for businesses on GigPark now also appear on their Canpages business profile - Here is an example of a business on GigPark and their recommendations also appearing on their Canpages.ca profile.

Why we think this is good news

• If you run a businesses, the recommendations of your business will be seen by thousands more people (Canpages.ca has well over 3.5 million unique visitors per month!)
• Because we’ve integrated with the Canpages business database we now have a very fancy autocomplete to help you write recommendations. Try typing the name of a business here. If you select a businesses from the autocomplete list then we add their contact information for you, automatically. This means faster recommending. Yay!
• To celebrate the integration we’re going to be running a series of pretty cool competitions. Stay tuned for more details very soon :).

Of course this is only the beginning. Now that we’re part of Canpages we have many bosses that make sure we work extra hard to keep improving things (and put cover sheets on our TPS reports). So, expect more big improvements in the months to come. Happy recommending everyone!

Big news for every GigPark user … GigPark has been purchased by Canpages!

Champagne in our coffee this morning! Yay!

Now we’re sure you have some questions, so here are some answers …

Who is Canpages?

Canpages is the fastest growing local search and directories publisher in Canada. On its way to becoming the market leader in local online search, Canpages’ website gets more than 3.5 million unique visitors per month and is a pretty awesome place to find a local business. Its iPhone and Blackberry apps are pretty sweet too. They also publish 84 print directories that reach 8 million households and business across the country.

And the icing on the cake is that Canpages is run by a bunch of really smart and nice people (shout out to our new colleagues!)

What’s going to happen to GigPark?

GigPark is not going anywhere. We will continue to be the easiest place to find the local services your friends use. And with Canpages’ support and resources, GigPark will become even more useful.

How will GigPark play with Canpages?

The acquisition enables Canpages to integrate GigPark’s recommendations into its online and mobile search platforms. Like we said, Canpages is already a pretty awesome place to find local businesses and the addition of GigPark will make this local search experience even better.

Beyond that, Canpages is also excited about the prospect of adding some of GigPark’s social functionality to better connect users with advertisers through recommendations from friends.

I’m a business owner on GigPark. What does this mean for me?

It means A LOT more people are going to see the testimonials for your business and you’ll likely get even more business. You’re welcome! :)

To finish off this very exciting blog post, we would like to thank everyone who helped GigPark get where it is today, especially our users. You are the heart and soul of our organization and we look forward to taking GigPark to the next level with you.  If you have any questions, as always, please feel free to email us at hello@gigpark.com.

Cheers from Pema, Noah, Paul, Tony, and Gianni!

UPDATE: There is a great story about the acquisition in today’s Globe and Mail. Also, here is the press release. And thanks so much for all of the congratulations you are sending via Twitter. You are too kind!

We have a winner of our 10” Eee PC contest … Amber George. Congrats Amber!!

Amber is a member of the Metro community in Vancouver. Not only has Amber made 5 recommendations of her own, she also runs Verve Hair Lounge, an eco-conscious boutique hair salon in North Vancouver that has been recommended 9 times!

Amber is thrilled that she won and, of course, shared with us her love for GigPark. :)

Thanks to everyone that entered the contest. Stay tuned for more GigPark contests.

Photo by TuTuWoN

A little reminder… keep an eye out for copies of your local Metro newspaper – available in Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton, Ottawa and Halifax. Each week 5 of the most recommended businesses from GigPark are featured – Top 5 Hairdressers in Vancouver for example.

This means your recommendations, or even your business, might be in the newspaper today. Like we say – keep en eye out!

PS – Run a businesses and want to get featured in Metro? Here are some tips.

Over the course of the past two years we have created some pretty cool and useful software tools in the process of building GigPark. We think a lot of people can benefit from these little gems, so we’re releasing them as open source projects! Here’s what we’ve made available so far:

• EC2 on Rails: Deploy a Ruby on Rails app on EC2 in five minutes
• Better Logging Rails Plugin: A Rails plugin that improves the log format
• Texpand: Textarea auto-expander a la Facebook
• HintText: Add hints to your forms the right way

This is awesome. How do I get it?

View our open source projects. All of our projects are made available on GitHub. For developers interested in using the projects or contributing, please fork us and send pull requests!

Thanks – you guys are cool!

NP. We know :)

We’re excited to announce a new partnership with Metro Canada – publisher of Canada’s #1 free national daily newspaper.

The partnership will enable Metro readers across English-speaking Canada to find local services, both online and in print, through recommendations from fellow Metro readers.

By visiting www.metronews.ca/gigpark, Metro readers will be able to browse recommendations for plumbers, accountants, personal trainers and hundreds of other services. Metro readers can also recommend their favourite businesses to the reader community. To accompany the online component, Metro print editions in Toronto, Vancouver, Ottawa, Edmonton, Calgary and Halifax will feature the most recommended businesses in that city on a weekly basis (e.g., Top 5 chiropractors in Calgary).

We’re hugely excited to be working with Metro and helping to offer a very cool service to their readers.

Win a 10″ Eee PC

To say thank you to everyone who joins the Metro Readers Community we’re giving away a 10′ Eee PC. Check out www.gigpark.com/win for all of the details.

Over the past couple of years the development community has been very kind to us, so we thought we’d make a little contribution back. It’s with great pleasure that we present Texpand.

What is it?

In short, Texpand is a javascript plugin that makes writing long posts easier by expanding the text input as you type. This is helpful because it prevents the user from constantly having to scroll around a text input, it also keeps your pages clean an clutter free.

On a slightly more technical note, Texpand is completely unobtrusive and degrades gracefully in browsers that don’t support javascript. Texpand is very easy to use, and by default requires zero configuration. However, it does provide a few advanced features should you want to do anything fancy.

Where can I get it?

Currently the Texpand source code and documentation is hosted on GitHub, available here:

Texpand on GitHub

Something missing? Fork our project and send us a pull request and we’ll get back to you!

Stay tuned for more open source projects from GigPark!