founded by tim and nina zagat, the Zagat survey has collected and published ratings of restaurants by diners since 1979. Zagat publishes surveys for restaurants, hotels, and nightlife in 70 major cities. Zagat has come a long way from its roots in the early 1980s, when the food loving zagats started compiling lists of their favorite restaurants for personal use and to share with their closest friends. But with the rise of the Internet e-commerce, and mobile technology, Zagat has strug gled to find a business model that stayed true to the company's origins. To generate their first survey, the zagats polled 200 people, and increased that number over time. Executives, tourists, and New York foodies alike found the list to be indispensable. Spurred by this success, the Zagats decided to publish their survey themselves. The few booksellers that took a risk in stocking the book were rewarded with sales so robust that the Zagat surveys became best sellers. The pair also published similar lists for other major cities, including Chicago, San Francisco and Washington, D.C. In addition to print books, zagat opened a unit that creates custom guides for corporate clients, like the ones at Citibank. For a long time, this business model was sufficient to ensure that Zagat survey was successful and profitable. When the dotcom bubble came along, venture capitalists were attracted to Zagat for its brand rec ognition-the Zagat name is instantly recognizable to food-lovers, travelers, and restaurateurs alike.zagat was one of the first companies to popular ize user-generated content, collecting restaurant reviews from its readers, aggregating those reviews and computing ratings. In addition to numeric rating scores, the survey also includes a short descriptive paragraph that incorporates selected quotations from several reviewers' comments about each restaurant or service. Venture capitalists saw that zagat had a golden opportunity to migrate its content from offline to online, Web, and mobile. of the many decisions the Zagats faced in bringing their content to the web, perhaps the most important was how much to change for various types of content. They ultimately decided to place all of their content behind a pay wall, relying on the Zagat brand to entice customers to purchase full online access. one of the most promiment members of the zagat investment group was nathan myhrvold, formerly the chief technology officer at microsoft. myhrvold supported the zagat's decision to use a pay wall for their content and maintained that putting all of their content online for free would have undermined their book sales.
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