restaurant reviews

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

Restaurant blogging has many nuances.

You can try, in general, to be constructive, like The Tablehopper. You can try to be artistically idiosyncratic like Orangette or From Lips to Fingers. Or you can decide to make chefs quake in their clogs like Frenchman Francois Simon who once said: "I start judging the minute I come in."

Perhaps that is the set of mind and soul espoused by a Taiwanese blogger (last name Liu) who wandered into a Taichung beef noodle restaurant. If so, it's an attitude that has reportedly landed her her in jail.

You see, the … Read more

Despite being a fan of Zagat's restaurant surveys, I've never been overly impressed with the mobile applications for Windows Mobile Smartphone and PocketPC, BlackBerry, and Palm.

Regrettably, Zagat To Go '09 for the iPhone and iPod Touch ($9.99 per year) isn't markedly different.

The components to a great mobile app are all there--venerable content, click-to-call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations for some restaurants, and search and sorting filters--but the whole is somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Stability is a major concern, the app cries for an in-app browser, and Zagat To Go … Read more

Zagat's iPhone debut has all the ingredients for making a great restaurant and nightspot ratings application for the iPhone--venerable content taken straight from the Zagat Survey, a phone number you can tap to initiate a call, a Web site link, OpenTable reservations and photos when available, and filters for searching by category and sorting results by ratings criteria. Yet somehow, the whole is slightly less than the sum of its parts.

This latest version handles GPS data much better than the debut build, a marked improvement. Now if it could just throw in an in-application browser for easily returning … Read more

BooRah, a service that uses semantic technology to find restaurant reviews online and combine them to give users a rating, announced that it has launched a new API for websites and businesses that want to display the company's reviews on their own sites.

The API allows users to search for restaurants in their city and view the detailed ratings for food, service, and ambiance that have already been generated on BooRah. The API will also give its users the option of displaying links for discounts, menus, and coupons. BooRah hopes users will employ the API's location capabilities to … Read more

MojoPages is a new user review site that launched last week. It's similar to Yelp, but MojoPages users can post video clips and pictures to individual reviews about restaurants and local attractions.

In addition to offering a free-form template to create your written masterpiece, MojoPages gives you a form on which you can rate each establishment's value, service, and quality--things often mentioned in a well-written review.

One of the other standouts of MojoPages is the implementation of user photos. Instead of just uploading photos to an establishment's profile page, you can add them to each review. This … Read more