yelp

RSS, Fire Eagle join LightPole's lookup posse

If I had to describe LightPole in 10 words or fewer, I'd call it an interface for accessing location-aware services from mobile phones. More than anything else, LightPole's downloadable application offers a listings and mapping format that many location-based services, such as Yelp and Yahoo Local, can squeeze into to gain more visibility or avoid creating their own rich cell phone applications.

It works like this. Users looking for stuff--a good restaurant, happy hour specials, or Internet cafe--can click open LightPole, select a service (MappyHour and Hotspotr are two more,) and can read about the establishment, call the … Read more

Facebook mini-feeds get hungrier: Yelp, Picasa, Flickr, Delicious

This post was updated at 2:54 PM PT with comment from Facebook.

Facebook members now have the options to import their activity from a number of external social-media sites into the "Mini-Feeds" on their profiles, a post on the company blog explained on Tuesday.

Currently, this is limited to business reviews site Yelp, bookmarking site Delicious (owned by Yahoo), and photo-sharing sites Flickr (also owned by Yahoo) and Picasa (owned by Google). More are on the way, including Digg, the post by engineer Harry Huai Wang assured members.

With aggregation the hottest topic in social networking these … Read more

LightPole turns on local services aggregator

LightPole doesn't think of itself as a search hub, an RSS reader, a mobile apps platform, or a maps source, even though the mobile app, publicly released on Tuesday, is all these things rolled into one.

LightPole's interface is a bit like Viigo's, but instead of hosting various news channels, LightPole (mostly) hosts channels for interactive services, targeting people on the move who are looking for activities around them.

People seeking a nearby hot spot, for example, would open the channel for Hotspotr, which sniffs out W-iFi cafes and other Internet gateways. MappyHour acts similarly for happy … Read more

Yelp's CEO: A 5-star rating for New York

q&a Last week, business reviews site Yelp (famous for its wild parties and opinionated members) announced that it had raked in $15 million in Series D venture funding--and that the San Francisco-based company would be opening a new office in New York. I caught up with Yelp co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman over the weekend to talk about a few numbers other than the five-star rating.

Yelp New York, in Manhattan's West Village, opens Monday. But according to Stoppelman, they won't be celebrating with one of the bashes that made his site a bit notorious.

You … Read more

Yelp yanks another $15 million

Yelp, the business reviews site that has gained a loyal following of opinionated young urbanites, as well as a couple of haters, announced on Wednesday that it has raked in a fresh $15 million in venture dough. The funding round, which closed Tuesday, comes from new investor DAG Ventures, as well as a number of existing investors.

Representatives of Yelp, which earns money through advertising revenue and sponsored listings, and has some much larger competitors, such as InterActiveCorp's Citysearch, say the current tally of reviews posted on the site is 2.3 million. Traffic is steadily climbing.

Google Analytics … Read more

JobDud is the BBB meets Yelp for disgruntled employees

Ever had a bad job before? When you were done working there, did you have the urge to steer others clear of treading the same path of personal destruction? I know I did. At one of my old jobs, people were so angry after layoffs that they started their own anticompany blogs.

For the slightly more level-headed there's JobDud, a site that lets you anonymously rant about how good, or bad an employer is. Like Yelp, JobDud uses a five-star rating and each company gets its own page where user reviews are listed and put together for an aggregate … Read more

Planjam does date planning/bachelor parties for nerds

If you've ever been put in charge of a guys night out, there's a new app for you. Personally I just go out and see what happens, but I know people who like to make itineraries, and they need tools. Planjam is such a tool.

The easiest way to describe it is like the Yellow Pages combined with Tripit's itinerary planner. All you have to do to create a plan is plug in your ZIP code, and pick from a selection of landmarks, restaurants, and local attractions that have been categorized by what scene you're into. … Read more

Avoid restaurants with bad kitchens using CleanScores

While Yelp, Yahoo Local, Zagat, Michelin and others can provide a fairly clear picture of whether or not an eatery is worth going to, there's another resource called CleanScores that takes a scientific approach--health inspection scores. Since scores are public, CleanScores takes that data along with a track record of all infractions, and turns them into an eye-friendly, searchable database. While only good for San Francisco and Los Angeles residents at the moment, the site is eventually planning to expand out to other parts of the United States.

What makes the service really useful (besides finding out your favorite … Read more

Yelp meets Google PageRank, has baby: Grayboxx

Grayboxx is a local recommendations service that's been quietly humming along since 2005. This morning they added 100 cities to the network, bringing the grand total up to 175. Grayboxx takes aggregate customer reviews from all over, and combines them by neighborhood to serve up business recommendations, kind of like what Google has done with its search results. Grayboxx will scour the internet for references to a business (be it tagged photos, or mentions in a blog post), and give that business a certain rank based on its pervasion. However unlike Yelp and Yahoo Local, which are designed and … Read more

Zocdoc gets between your teeth (hopefully)

Zocdoc is a new service for finding local dentists and booking appointments for times that work with your schedule. It's aim is to replace the often aggravating process of trying to find a local dentist through the overwhelming, and often non-user-friendly directories provided by insurance companies.

Just plug in your city or ZIP code, and Zocdoc will pull up a list of local dentists, along with their daily appointment openings and insurance options. You can sort open appointment times by the type of service you're looking for--e.g., cleanings, Invisalign, or the hallowed root canal. If you find … Read more