Products & Services

Smalltown® is building the best online advertising platform for small and medium sized businesses.

Why a platform designed specifically for SMBs?

Imagine starting a small local business you want to promote on the Internet. First, you need a website, which involves buying a domain, finding a host, and creating the site. Perhaps you'd like to include a video on your website, but you don't know where to have the video produced or how to upload it. Or maybe you've read about an online coupon system that you'd like to add to your website, but the provider requires the integration of their technology through APIs and you don't have an engineering staff.

After launching your website, you most likely will find that very few people are visiting it. You'll need to do search engine optimization and possibly run a search engine marketing campaign on Google and Yahoo!. Both of these tasks require a great deal of domain expertise and time. You now need to create and track an additional asset for the ad networks.

You might also want your website to be available on mobile devices, but it doesn't fit on a small screen. An Internet yellow pages directory has offered you an enhanced listing on their site, but they also require you to design and maintain a custom landing page.

Finally, since you're a small business, it's probably true that most of your customers are local. How do you use the World Wide Web to connect with your customers who are within driving distance of your facilities?

In summary, the disjointed assortment of online advertising products and services offered to small local businesses is confusing, expensive, and ineffective.

The Smalltown Platform

Smalltown is solving these problems by creating a simple, one-stop solution that consists of three proprietary innovations. The first, called the Webcard™ Universal Business Listing, is a completely new type of website designed to meet the specific needs of SMBs. It can be thought of as a "create once, publish anywhere and change often" portable mini-website. The second technology is a turnkey SMB directory destination site that leverages Smalltown's new Website technology to connect SMBs with their local customers. The third is a reseller program that enables Internet destinations of all types to incorporate Webcard™ listings.

Webcard™ listings are engineered to serve as a single entryway from which small businesses can efficiently manage all their online marketing. They are the integration point for text, photos, videos, coupons, maps and hyperlinks, and soon will deliver more features designed for SMBs. Webcard™ listings can be published to destinations across the Internet, including search sites, mobile devices, IYPs, ad networks, and television. Changes made to a Webcard™ listing are instantly reflected wherever it appears on the Internet.

Smalltown's second innovation, a hosted white-label directory website, is a hosted solution for easily launching an interactive rich-media local destination site. These scalable, next-generation websites take full advantage of Webcard™ listings, and can target audiences by geography (a local newspaper website), business category (a national website for pet care professionals) or organization (a Chamber of Commerce). The solution includes a robust, subscription-based billing system.

Third, the Smalltown Reseller Program is a technology that includes a set of simple APIs that make it easy for other companies in the SMB ecosystem to leverage the rich merchant generated content found in Webcard™ listings.

Management

Smalltown is operated by an award-winning team of Silicon Valley veterans with a deep expertise in SMB advertising. A significant patent was applied for in early 2006. Additional assets include the Local2me online community service. For additional information, please contact us.