The language around the industry has changed over the past year as institutional investors began to make up more of the loan buying volume-so the name changed from "P2P" to "Marketplace Lending"
I really like Mention, since they also have a mobile app and the free tier does everything I want. We used it to hop into conversations on forums about car buying.
I agree with u/canatan01 that Moz is best for backlink tracking.
I am a little unclear what you mean by an advertising revenue model. There are two ways to implement this model:
1. Have dealers pay you to advertise their inventory on your site - similar to AutoTrader and traditional classified sites.
2. Run AdWords or some other advertisements on the site to earn money.
We had a true reverse auction platform where customers selected 3 identical/similar new/used vehicles and we initially pushed for a charge per car sold model (ie TrueCar). But many dealers had been turned off by TrueCar bad reputation and it's struggles with charging a similar brokering fee, so they weren't interested in AutoRef's service at all.
After that we went for a flat monthly fee but ultimately it was too little too late. So it's possible that your idea could work but we sure had a tough time implementing it.
TrueCar has always had a consistent revenue stream from its acquisition of Zag - which ran the car buying program for many car insurance company's, AAA, etc. This is a definite edge over a startup bootstrapping ad revenue.
Aggregating public transit delays. In NYC the current solution is text message alerts and/or paper notices in the subway. If transit apps (Google maps, Transit, etc.) had this information, they would serve as better channels to distribute the information to the public.
I use Base CRM because it's ridiculously simple for contacts and on my galaxy nexus the app is one of the few that is truly awesome. It keeps my business and personal contacts separate and lets me add notes and tasks after every work call.
This is actually what AutoRef.com, the startup I'm working with does. While it is similar to CarWoo for used cars, interacting with dealerships about specific vehicles tied to a VIN number is quite complex.
