Grayboxx Gets Darker – Sells to Bay Advisor

Bob Chandra, CEO of Grayboxx, a local search start-up, just informed me that the company is selling its IP to Bay Advisor. Grayboxx launched last year with a lot of industry interest in their “Preference Scoring” algorithm. Grayboxx had aggregated data about businesses and ranked those businesses according to their mysterious formula.

Some industry insiders I have spoken with found the results to be pretty impressive but it’s definitely a challenge for any start-up to become the industry standard. The service’s audience had been growing thanks to local search engine optimization, but according to Chandra they felt that Bay Advisor could exploit the technology in a bigger way. It’s not completely clear what Bay Advisor intends to do with the Preference Scoring data but my guess is that we will see a more focused local search application come out of this.

I give Bob and his team a lot of credit for trying to bring some innovation to local search. Best of luck to them on their future endeavors.

Newsflash: According to Chandra his next project is Site605, which looks like what you would get if Mahalo mated with Mechanical Turk.

Update: Check out my friend Zach’s site Artbreak.com, where you can sell art online.