InterActive Corp

Announcing My New Role

~ Sebastien Provencher ~ 3 Comments

Today, I’m very happy to announce that I’ve joined HomeAdvisor Canada as Vice President of Product Innovation. Based out of Montreal (Canada), I will be responsible for growing HomeAdvisor in Canada and developing innovative new products for homeowners and service professionals.

For those of you less familiar with HomeAdvisor (formerly called ServiceMagic), it is a U.S.-based company that connects homeowners with pre-screened and customer-rated service professionals and provides a suite of comprehensive tools, products and resources to help with home improvement, maintenance and repair needs. HomeAdvisor’s international operations include Canada, France, UK and Germany.  HomeAdvisor is a subsidiary of IAC (NASDAQ: IACI). You can find out more about the company in its “About” section.

I’m very impressed with the company’s senior management team and I’m excited to join the organization. This new senior role fits perfectly as a next step in my career, allowing me to continue building innovative local search products in a very entrepreneurial environment.

You can find the official press release announcement here.

Vous trouverez le communiqué de presse officiel ici.

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InterActive Corp to Launch AskCity, a Massive Mash-up of all their Local Properties

~ Sebastien Provencher ~ 2 Comments

Via the Lost Remote blog, Interactive Corp (IAC) announced the launch of AskCity, a new local information service that will mash-up all of IAC’s local content together. It will combine content from Ask.com, CitySearch, Evite and TicketMaster. I suspect this will be a channel of Ask.com (as the AskCity.com URL is owned by this company) and they will use search as the entry door to all that content. The service is scheduled to launch on December 4th, followed quickly by a full redesign of the Ask.com site.

What it means: it’s a good beginning but they might need to aggregate additional external content (newspapers, TV, etc.) to make this even more interesting and relevant from a local perspective. It’s also interesting that they chose to keep all destination sites in addition to this new service (potentially driven by search). This create a massive new entry door into existing content. I might be mistaken but it’s also the first major move at improving Ask.com since the acquisition. I’ll be keeping an eye out for this one.