Last September, the local services company RedBeacon took the top award at TechCrunch 50 with an innovative approach to local search. Today, it announced a new set of social features and a partnership with BigTent, an online community.

RedBeacon allows you to post a job request to service providers in your local area. Let’s say, you want a personal trainer who’s available on Saturday mornings. A handful of personal trainers respond to your request with price quotes. You pick the one you want, and schedule the appointment with a click. Think of it as a next-generation yellow pages.

RedBeacon says its focus is on helping users make the best decisions. They currently aggregate reviews from Yelp, Google and Yahoo, and today they’re rolling out a new feature (above) that pings your Facebook friends for their advice. Your friends see the update on their wall, click to RedBeacon, and leave their feedback. They can even suggest a new service provider, which RedBeacon in turn contacts for a quote.

“This is really adding a social layer to RedBeacon,” said CEO Ethan Anderson. “It’s something we haven’t really seen in the local search space.”

RedBeacon has also rolled out the ability for service providers to list endorsements from trusted organizations, like the Better Business Bureau (see at bottom of image above). These endorsements appear as badges on providers’ profile pages. And with a new partnership with BigTent, endorsements from community groups will also appear.

This combination of reviews and endorsements from friends, family, community groups and trusted organizations is a more holistic approach to providing users with as much information as possible to make the right decision. You can imagine how this free approach to not only finding a qualified service provider, but book one on the spot, could be a competitive threat to the paid Angie’s List model.

But as always, RedBeacon faces the tall challenge of scaling outside its pilot market of the tech-savvy Bay Area. Anderson says they’re pursuing more funding, as well as closing more distribution partnerships like BigTent. So stay tuned…

No related posts.