We’ve always been impressed with the Citylocal franchise which was built by Nazir Daud in the UK. Paul Brugger launched the Cork site last year and it has been growing at an amazing rate. CityLocal Cork is a Business Directory and community website that provides local information on Businesses, News, Events, Free Ads, Property and Cinema listings.

Visitors to Citylocal often leave reviews of the businesses they find there. We are now aggregating those reviews into our system, adding to the already powerful SEO mojo of Citylocal. By doing this, Citylocal’s customers will now see their reviews appearing on loudervoice.com, on Google Android mobile phones and shared by users to Facebook and a multitude of other social networking sites. In every case, the reviews point back to their Citylocal presence.

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.

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.