yelp

Hack a collaborative Google Map to share food reviews with friends

Services like Yelp and Urbanspoon are helpful when seeking a place to eat, but can sometimes overwhelm you with options. Additionally, you'll probably find comments that are unrealistic (possibly from an owner), and others written by people who simply can't be pleased mixed throughout any solid feedback.

Instead of trying to decode the truth, why not make a map that only you and your friends can edit and comment on? Here's how to get started:

Create the map that you and friends will be editing

Step 1: Head over to Google Maps in your Web … Read more

Yelp for restaurant listings

Yelp is the premier online city guide that helps you find restaurants and other businesses in your area. It not only provides vital information like hours, addresses, and phone numbers, it also offers a treasure trove of user-submitted reviews, ratings, and photos.

Since Yelp taps into your mobile device's GPS powers, it can easily help you find businesses nearby. Alternatively, you can indicate a city of your choice to search elsewhere. You can conduct your search based on keyword, or browse through listings by category. And the Yelp app offers a few filters to further narrow your search, including … Read more

The stage is set for a monster Facebook IPO

With Yelp's impressive IPO out of the way, all eyes are now on Facebook and its highly anticipated public debut. And thanks to Yelp, Facebook will have a lot of momentum for its IPO.

On its first day as a public company, Yelp's stock jumped by more than 60 percent, valuing the company north of $1.4 billion. It remains to be seen how Yelp will fare in the weeks to come, but for now Wall Street has declared Yelp a winner.

It's a stark difference from Groupon and Zynga's run on the public market. Groupon … Read more

Yelp for restaurant listings

Yowza! Yelp surges to 64 percent gain in first day of trading

If there was any doubt about Yelp's IPO pricing, it should be laid to rest right now.

The local-reviews site kicked off its IPO at $15 a share today on the Nasdaq, but soon after trading began, the stock jumped 73 percent to $26. After hitting the high mark, the shares cooled off a bit, eventually ending the day up 64 percent to land at $24.58.

Yelp in November announced its plans to go public. The company yesterday priced its shares at $15, raising $107.25 million on the 7.15 million shares it made available.

From a … Read more

Yelp IPO: Stock set to begin trading tomorrow at $15

Add Yelp to the growing list of freshly public tech companies.

The local-reviews site today set its initial trading price at $15 a share, a little higher than observers had expected, valuing the company at $898 million.

Yelp's revenue, achieved by selling ads to local businesses, climbed 74 percent to $83.3 million in 2011. However, its losses widened to $16.7 million from a year-earlier loss of $9.7 million as total costs and expenses rose. The company says it doesn't expect to be profitable in the near term because it's still focused on investing in … Read more

Yelp aims to go public in March, raise $100M

The local-reviews site Yelp today set a price range for its IPO of between $12 and $14 a share in an offering that would value the company at as much as $839 million.

Yelp, which aims to sell 7.15 million shares, is seeking to raise about $100 million. It expects to price on March 1 and begin trading on March 2 under the ticker YELP.

The San Francisco-based company filed to go public in November, with speculation that it would seek a valuation between $1 billion and $2 billion. Yelp has raised $56 million in venture funding to date. … Read more

Poynt yourself in the right direction

Poynt rolls all of the local discovery tools you need into one application. You can use it to search for restaurants, events, deals, people, businesses, movie tickets, even gas prices.

With all that functionality, fortunately Poynt's interface is simple and straightforward. Just open up the app and tap any of the icons on the home page to begin your search. All of the search tools take your GPS location into account, which means in most cases you'll get the most-relevant results. Also, many of the tools have additional options to help you further refine your search, if necessary.… Read more

Now you can Yelp in your BMW

BMW announced today that drivers of vehicles equipped with BMW Online will be able to access Yelp in their cars.

That's right, the love-it or hate-it user-contributed review site is the latest app to make it into BMW's suite of application integrations. But this time, drivers will be able to Yelp with or without an iPhone.

Thanks to a change earlier this month with BMW Online, drivers will be able to download the Yelp application directly to their vehicles. Unlike Pandora and Mog app integrations, users won't need to have or use their iPhone to access Yelp. … Read more

Dentist charges patient for negative Yelp reviews, suit says

Online reviews are sticky little things.

I recently stayed at a hotel that someone on TripAdvisor had described as having filthy--in fact, sticky--conditions and I found it perfectly nice.

So one wonders about all the ramifications surrounding the case of New York dentist, Stacy Makhnevich. She is alleged to have gotten her teeth so deeply into a patient that she began charging him $100 a day for negative Yelp reviews.

The way TechDirt examines it, Makhnevich requires patients to sign a form handing her copyright to any online reviews.

Should the reviews not glow in the dark, she allegedly has … Read more