We’re absolutely delighted to be nominated in the inaugural Europa Awards in the category of Best Web Application or Service (EMEA). The Europas are the Techcrunch Europe technology innovation awards for European tech companies and the ceremony will be held on July 9 in London. Public voting is now open in all categories.

Major congratulations also go to Joe Drumgoole of Putplace who is nominated in the Best Startup Founder(s) (EMEA) category (Vote here) and Decisions for Heroes which is nominated in the Best Social Innovation (which benefits society, EMEA) category. (Vote here).

Krishna De of Biz Growth Live did an extended interview with CEO Conor all about ratings and reviews. If you want to hear a lot of valuable information about why reviews make sense for your business, have a listen.

Thanks Krishna!

LouderVoice was the first reviews company to realise the importance of Twitter. That’s why we’re the people behind @review which we launched in June 2007.

Since then we’ve played and tweaked mini-reviews based on user feedback.

Following more research we realised that many people were doing mini-reviews using the simple method of just adding #review on to the end of the tweet. This was also the preferred approach in our recent poll.

So this week we finally added support for that. Just write your review as a standard tweet and stick #review in there somewhere. Ideally give a score too. e.g. 4/5, 5-stars, 7/10 etc

We’ll add those to LouderVoice throughout the day and link right back to you.

You don’t even need an account on LouderVoice to do this!

So you go from this:

To this:

Happy reviewing.

Yesterday evening we uploaded the first public beta of our Google Android mobile application to the Android Market.

This is the first Irish Android application and one of the very first reviewing applications on the platform.

You’ll have to patiently wait for the launches of the HTC Magic and Samsung I7500 before  most Irish people can try it out. Anyone living in countries where Android is already live can install it now.

If you aren’t familiar with Android, it is a new mobile platform created by Google and about to be launched on a plethora of phones by most of the major manufacturers. The first phone, the HTC G1, was launched in the US and UK initially and the HTC Magic is currently being launched in many European countries.

Our application is all about writing and finding reviews when you are out and about with your Android phone. It makes full use of cell-tower location and GPS to give you the reviews you need for where you are now.

In addition to finding reviews written on our www site and Android, you can also browse/search reviews from our partners and clients. That includes reviews of many of Roomex’s 20,000 hotels, Puddleducks outdoor gear, Klipsch audio products and Bubble Brothers wines.

The application is also available in white-label OEM form and would be an ideal pre-install for many networks!

We’d like to thank our development partners in this release. Marino Software in Dublin did the Android work and we recommend them to anyone for both Android and iPhone development. Yazzgoth in Cork continues to do a great job building out our API and business services using their expertise in Python and Django. Note that the Android App uses the same API available to our business customers and shows just how powerful it is.

If you have an Android phone, we’d love to hear what you think. You can find it as “LouderVoice Reviews” in the Lifestyle section of the Market on your phone.

If you don’t have an Android phone, trust us, you’re going to want one, it’s a fantastic system, particularly if you use GMail, GCal, GTalk etc. This will be the biggest mobile platform ever released.

In the meantime, if you want to have a look at our application in action, you should check-out the fantastic video review that Cathal Garvey made of it yesterday. Thanks Cathal! We’ll upload some screencasts of our own next week too.

We’re pleased as punch to announce that our brand new customer reviews widget has just gone live on the Bubble Brothers wine site. Julian, their Wine 2.0 guru, has always been at the forefront of social media adoption and the addition of our widget complements all of their other online activities beautifully.

The key thing about the widget is the ease of implementation. One line of code was added to the Bubble Brothers product page template (they use Ecommerce Templates for their site), a few minor logo tweaks later and they were up and running. No development on their side and just some quick colour/size adjustments by us. That’s all it takes to review-enable an entire site!

All of the reviews submitted on the Bubble Brothers site will be findable via our consumer-facing reviews site and via our imminent Google Android mobile application. Relevant reviews written on either of those will also appear on Bubble Brothers.

The widget is the perfect solution for SMEs who want to gain the sales and marketing benefits of customer reviews but who don’t have the the expertise to implement a custom solution. In the case of Bubble Brothers we replaced the built-in reviews feature which simply doesn’t provide anything like the benefits of the LouderVoice system. Contact us on business@loudervoice.com if you want to review-enable your business.

It’s always a delight to work with like-minded companies so we were doubly pleased when Puddleducks.ie contacted us recently about using the LouderVoice customer reviews system on their site.

Puddleducks is a rapidly growing online retailer of outdoor clothing for both children’s and adults. In fact,  we first encountered them as personal customers of their fantastic products. Their range includes Swedish designed dungarees, jackets and trousers for children, as well as waterproof clothing and work wear for adults.

After a very short implementation period, all of their customers can now read product reviews by previous purchasers and submit their own. Of course, all of those reviews are aggregated to the LouderVoice reviews website and our soon-to-be-launched mobile phone applications.

Puddleducks were also deservedly shortlisted today for the 2009 Irish Internet Association Net Visionary Awards as Best Online Trader (why not give them a vote!). We’re thrilled to have them on-board as a client and look forward to helping them grow their customer base even faster.

The LouderVoice customer reviews service is getting a lot of attention from businesses who are looking for ways to retain customers and grow sales in these difficult times.

So the latest research from Avail Intellingence comes as no surprise to us. InternetRetailing reports that the research shows over a third (36%) of respondents rated peer opinions such as recommendations, reviews and customer generated wish lists as the most useful aspect of an Internet-shopping site.

We’re currently trialling our review widget solution with several clients. The first of these should go live in the next two weeks. This simple way to “review-enable” your site can be implemented by pasting one line of code on a web-page. Our current record is 5 minutes for implementation but we think we can do better Contact business AT loudervoice DOT com.

How about adding $2.7B to you bottom line?

Via Econsultancy:

… calculates that, since displaying the most helpful reviews has increased sales in the media products category by 20%, overall this feature was worth $2.7bn to Amazon

Contact business@loudervoice.com if you’d like to hear how reviews can help your business!

Nice piece by John Collins in The Irish Times Innovation magazine today about the iPhone App Store and Android. Quotes from Conor, Pat Phelan and Steve Troughton-Smith.

“An awful lot of developers had no route to market before the App Store came along,” says Conor O’Neill, software industry veteran and managing director of online review site LouderVoice. He cites the case of Steven Troughton-Smith, a 20-year-old Irish student who has sold thousands of copies of his iPhone applications. In the first six days it was available, Speed, an application that shows how fast you’re travelling, was downloaded 36,000 times. The application was free at that time, but now sells for €0.79.

“If someone like that had tried to set up on any other platform, no one would have taken him seriously,” says O’Neill.

In fact, the thing I’m reminded most of with the App Store is the Home Computer revolution in the early 1980s. Matthew Smith of Manic Miner fame is still one of my heroes. Is iPhone/Android the modern equivalent of C64/ZXSpectrum?

We have two bits of news about our LouderVoice plug-in. The first is that it is now Wordpress 2.7 compatible and the second is that we have moved the hosting over to Wordpress.org. This means that from now on, when we update it, you’ll see a notification in your Wordpress Admin Panel.

Apart from the 2.7 compatibility change, the only other major feature is that you can opt to have all the contextual information about the review, including the stars, at the end of the text. Full instructions in the readme.

Apologies to anyone who downloaded it over the past two weeks. We have moved its location and name on Wordpress.org to be more logical. Please delete the recent version and replace with this new one. 

If you use Wordpress for your blog (not Wordpress.com) and you like to write reviews, then we highly recommend you use our plugin. It formats the reviews in an open portable format and makes them easier to index properly. If you don’t like any aspect of the plugin, feel free to change it, since it is released under the GPL licence.