Goodrec launches mobile recommendation engine

The final start-up presenter at TechCrunch50 summed up many of the themes at the event--mobile, social, and on the iPhone.

Goodrec is a service for mobile browsers that features recommendations from people you trust. Rather than rambling reviews, GoodRec has a simple thumbs up, thumbs down, or mixed rating (no stars) and short text messages for evaluating restaurants, bars, movies, books, and other entities. The service also allows posting of photos and other content associated with making recommendations.

The challenge for GoodRec is getting distribution and users to create a social web of recommendations. Users are already giving recommendations on Facebook, MySpace, Yelp, and a variety of other other services. "We learned that a barrier to making reviews is that a lot of people are willing to do it privately, so GoodRec has Facebook-like capability to limit who sees your recommendations," said Goodrec CEO Mihir Shah. Goodrec also has proprietary technology for providing recommendations to users based on personal taste and recommendations from friends, he said.

"This kind of functionality married to Twitter is a powerful application," said TechCrunch judge and former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner. As a standalone application, Goodrec has a lot of competition. Integrating deeply with a Twitter-like service and other social networks may be the best route for Goodrec to succeed.