New York-based customer loyalty startup LocalBonus is expanding to four new cities: Seattle, Portland, Sacramento and Denver. The company has also announced that it has raised more than $500,000 in a seed funding round from Payment Ventures, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator, and other angels…
Positive Yelp scores translate into real revenue boosts for local restaurants but not for chains. That’s the basic finding of a recent study by Michael Luca, a researcher at Harvard Business School. He found that a one-star differential in ratings on the popular crowd-sourced review site can bump revenues by 5% to 9% at a local restaurant. This is not entirely surprising. What is more interesting is that chain restaurants did not benefit from any significant increase in profitability or revenue corresponding to Yelp ratings…