Wap Review

Yelp.com is a site featuring user generated reviews of businesses, services and attractions mainly in major US cities. Restaurants seem to be the main focus but users are free to review anything. There are plenty of reviews of clubs, hair salons, auto repair places and even cell phone stores. I'd never heard of Yelp until I read Oliver Starr's writeup of it's new mobile site. Apparently I don't get out enough. It seems that Yelp is a genuine hit especially in the San Francisco Bay area where the site is based. There are close to 100,000 reviews posted on the site. The San Francisco restaurant coverage is very complete and includes most of the neighborhood favorites that you'll never find in tourist guides. Many reviews feature photos of the thing being reviewed including, in the case of restaurants, the food. A Yahoo map pinpoints the location of every review subject. In addition to San Francisco, Yelp seems to be taking off all around the country but especially in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles.

Besides being a review site Yelp is also a bit of a community as well. Yelp members can participate in a chat board and send private messages to each other. Many of the reviews comment on other reviews with the original reviewer commenting back. Each reviewer also gets a profile page where they can post their photo and list their likes, dislikes and a little biographic information. You can also nominate yourself for Elite status which if you're approved gets you invited to Yelp sponsored parties and concerts. Approval seems to be tied to being a prolific reviewer who participates in the social features.
Read more about Yelp, at Wikipedia and the The San Francisco Chronicle.

Yelp Mobile is sponsored by Palm which I think is great. Handset makers need good mobile sites to showcase their products. I hope this becomes a trend with Nokia, Motorola, etc. helping to support the development of useful and compelling mobile services like Yelp.

The Yelp mobile site contains all the Yelp reviews searchable by keyword and neighborhood or by distance from a city, zip-code or street address. Reviews are also browsable by category. It's not possible to log into Yelp from the mobile pages so none of the social features are available. This is probably just as well as the quality of writing in the current crop of reviews is quite high. Mobile posting doesn't lend itself in in-depth or even insightful reviewing. I could see the the messaging and chat being extended to mobile but so far Yelp mobile is strictly a review site. As such, it's a great thing to have handy when you are out and get the urge for some food, drink or entertainment and as a shopping resource.

Although Yelp Mobile claims to be "Optimized for Palm Treo" it works well on most any WAP2 phone. The reviews are text only and broken into pages under approximately 10 KB. Photos and maps are on separate pages. The photos are 100x100 PX, 3KB each and are displayed 10 to a page. Maps are 240x320px. That makes both the maps and the photo pages marginal for some non-smartphones. Opera Mini is a good solution if your phone's browser acts up with Yelp's graphical pages. Or you can confine yourself to the reviews which are text and work fine on any device.

In keeping with the touchscreen Palm optimization, there are no accesskeys but that really isn't much of an issue as the site is well sized and organized for mobile use even with a keypad.

IAC/InterActiveCorp's Citysearch is the second biggest (after Yelp.com) US city guide site.  The mobile edition of Citysearch includes most of the features of the full site including user reviews, maps and directions, photos and editor picks. Citysearch mobile also has click to call phone numbers and an option to send an SMS containing a business listing to any phone.

Google's beta Local Search has been mobilized. Lets you search for businesses and services near a zip code or in a city. Simple intuitive interface of consists of just two textboxes labeled "What" and "Where" and a Search button. Search quality seems good returning most of the relevant nearby businesses in my tests. Highlights the hits it has found a little 120x120 pixel scrollable and resizable map.

Yahoo Local search is a little strange. It's as if it were based on the Business White Pages and returns listings that contain the search string in their name. Thus a search for "restaurants" will only find those establishments with "restaurant(s)" in their names. This means that it's really only practical to search by an establishment's name. Once you have found what you are looking for, Yahoo displays your destination on an appropriately small (128 x 128px) map and provides driving directions to it.

Microsoft's Local Search (beta) which is very similar to the Google and Yahoo Local Search offerings came out in June 2005. Searches by keyword and zip code or address return a list of hits, selecting a hit gives a map and a link to driving directions. The quality of the local search seems good, finding most of the restaurants in my neighborhood, for example. Browser detection is used to vary the map's size from 110 x 110 to 217 x 217 px depending on phone capabilities.

The "wisdom of the crowd" concept where the averaged opinions of thousands of people is used to evaluate the worth of a product or idea is a certainly big part of today's web, think of Amazon Reviews, TripAdvisor.com or Digg. As much as it's a part of the current web 2.0 buzz it's not a new idea.

Zagat Survey has been applying the "wisdom of the crowd" since got it's start in 1979 with a New York City restaurant guidebook based on reviews submitted by thousands of reader volunteers. Zagat has since expanded to cover hotels, night spots, golf courses, entertainment and shopping in over 70 cities around the world.

Nowadays besides paper guidebooks, Zagat has a big web presence and offers mobile guide applications for Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Blackberry devices. This week they launched Zagat.mobi on the mobile web.

The mobile site's coverage is limited to restaurants, hotels and night spots in 16 US and Canadian cites plus London, Paris and Tokyo. For the covered cites the mobile and web listings seem essentially identical. Like the web site, the .mobi one is free to browse without registration. However the Zagat ratings are only available to paying customers. To see the ratings you must join Zagat for 24.95/year or 4.95/month. Even without ratings Zagat.mobi is useful. The listings give hours of operation, details like type of cuisine and include click to call phone numbers and the ability to send a listing to any phone number or email address. One feature of the mobile site that's not available on the web is tyou can browse Zagat's top 5 picks for quality or price. You can even sort results by those criteria which is almost as good as being able to see the ratings. There's a handy Find Nearby feature for bar hopping or when the wait for a table is too long and you want to find another place in the neighborhood.

The mobile site is well designed with an average page size of 5 KB plus about 9 KB of images. It should load quickly and work well on most phones. Numeric shortcuts speed navigation by providing single click access to features and reviews.

One thing I noticed though is that if you go to zagat.mobi with a desktop browser or a mobile browser that Zagat's doesn't recognize you'll be rediected to the desktop page at www.zagat.com. The biggest, perhaps the only, advantage of a .mobi address is that it should always point to a mobile site. Browser detection is great when it works. The trouble is that it doesn't work 100% of the time. Every site that does browser detection needs to have a direct link to their mobile site on their desktop page and another link on the mobile page that always delivers a desktop page. That gives the user who is redirected to the wrong site a way to recover.

AOL Local seems to be AOL's latest replacement for Digital City Mobile which used to be my favorite city guide but degraded into a bunch of broken links and eventually disappeared completely.  Everything works in AOL Local but compared to Digital City there are far ewer listings and superficial descriptions instead of real reviews.

I love OpenTable. If you aren't familiar with the service, it's an online search for available reservations at local restaurants. You select your city, preferred dinning time, the size of your party and optionally the neighborhood and cuisine and OpenTable returns a list all the restaurants that have availability. It such a time saver compared with calling up restaurant after restaurant, being put on hold for five minutes and then being told "Sorry we have nothing available at that time".

The site is very popular here in the San Francisco Bay area and seems to be taking off elsewhere too.  VentureBeat reports that OpenTable books reservations for 3 million diners per month and estimates the company's annual gross revenue at $14 million a year. The service is free to consumers, restaurants pay a fee per diner to OpenTable It must be cost effective for restaurateurs, 8500 have signed up.

OpenTable just launched a mobile site. This is such a great fit for mobile. Now you don't even need to be near a computer to make reservations quickly and easily. At least that's the promise. I just tried it out and successfully made a reservation on OpenTable mobile. The process worked but it has a few rough edges.

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Urbanspoon is a crowd sourced guide to dinning out in about 100 major metropolitan areas in the US and Canada. The web based start-up launched a location aware iPhone app shortly after Apple opened up the platform to third party developers. The app quickly became one of the 10 most downloaded apps on iTunes. Urbanspoon really hit it big after Apple featured it in a commercial. In a nice exit for the founders, the self-funded three man start-up was acquired last year by IAC for an unknown price that is generally believed to be several million dollars.

I recently discovered Urbanspoon's mobile website at urbanspoon.com/m. While it has the look and feel of an iPhone web app, page sizes under 100 KB and no JavaScript dependencies mean it will work well with the majority of mobile browsers.

After picking a city, the site lets you search for a restaurant by name or keywords or browse by neighborhood and/or cuisine.  Listings feature a percentage ranking based on the number of "Like" votes by users and generally include address, with link to a Google mobile map, phone number, approximate price range, critic reviews from IAC owned CitySearch, blogs and local newspaper critics plus user reviews. Mobile usability could be better, though. Phone numbers are not click to call and their is no information on what days and hours each establishment is open.

Urbanspoon's chief rival is Yelp (Yelp mobile review).  Both here in Yelp's home base of San Francisco and in Seattle, where Urbanspoon started, Yelp seems to have slightly more restaurant listings and many more user reviews. I think Urbanspoon's inclusion of critic reviews, which I tend to trust more than user's, makes the two services approximately equal in usefulness for finding a good place to eat. Yelp wins big on usability though by providing by click to call numbers and open hours listings.

Live On The Go (liveonthego.com) seems to be a rather cool service that lets you use your iPhone, BlackBerry or Symbian phone to place takeout food orders at nearby restaurants in the US only. You search for restaurants by zip code or address and browse takeout menus, selecting the items you want. LiveOnTheGo places your order and tells you when it will be ready for pickup.

I'm somewhat surprised by the rather limited handset support. Live On The Go is a web app, though not a very sophisticated one, just a series of web forms. It's not even location enabled, something that's doable on the iPhone and BlackBerry. It seems to work on just about any BlackBerry, even ancient models running BlackBerry OS 4.1. The BlackBerry browser, especially on older models, is one of the worst mobile browsers on any smartphone. If this site works on an old BlackBerry, there is no reason why it shouldn't also work with Android, Palm Pre, Windows Mobile devices, Opera Mini and even some of the better feature phone browsers. But if you go to liveonthego.com with any of those browsers you get redirected to the desktop site, which is usable on my Android phone at least, but not nearly as convenient as the mobile one would be.

According to both AdMob and Millennial, smartphones still account for less than 50% of total mobile web and application traffic in the US! Live on the go seems like a smart company but why are they throwing away well over half of their potential market by restricting access to their mobile site to a subset of capable phones?

Nextstop describes itself as a "...community effort to build a catalog of all the best things to do, places to go, and experiences to try anywhere in the world" It's a mobile webapp for Android and iPhone that uses  HTML5's geolocation, local storage and application caching features to display interesting nearby places as a grid of thumb-nailed images. Click an image to see a descriptions, larger photo, map and user reviews and comments.  Source: Google Code Blog

Goodrec is another user generated reviews site somewhat like Zagat, Yelp and Boorah.  Like Yelp, Goodrec is not limited to restaurant reviews, users can review anything; clubs, hotels, restaurants, services, products, etc.

Goodrec differentiates itself from its competitors in a couple of ways. For one, Goodrec limits reviews (called "recommendations") to a concise and mobile friendly 140 characters and encourages users to submit recommendations from their mobiles. In a video interview, Goodrec co-founder touts the ease of making recommendations from mobile and mentions that some users have submitted as many as 200 recommendations in a day and that  40% of Goodrec users make recommendations with about 50% of the recommendations coming from mobile users. Other things that set Goodrec apart from the competition are the  an option to view only recommendations from friends and the ability to save recommendations in a personal "I want to go" list.

The well designed mobile site's listings include recommendations, thumbs up and down ratings, addresses, hours, maps, and click to call numbers. For a new site, Goodrec seems to have quite a few listings particularly for the U.S. East and West Coasts and major European cities. In addition to web and mobile sites, Goodrec has a couple of iPhone apps and Twitter and Facebook integration. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

BooRah is crowd-sourced restaurant review site along the lines of Yelp (review) or Zagat (review) but with a couple of differences. First, instead of relying only it's own members to build up a critical mass of reviews, BooRah pulls in reviews from other sites like CitySearch, Insider Pages and Yahoo Reviews. The other difference is that BooRah ignores the scores and star ratings in these reviews. Instead it performs a structural and semantic analysis of the review text and extracts whether the reviewer is expressing a negative (Boo) or positive (Rah) feeling on three specific aspects of the dinning experience; service, ambiance and food. A restaurant's Boos and Rahs are used to create an overall percentage rating and separate ratings in each category. There's a good interview of BooRah co-founder and CTO Nagaraju Bandaru by Peggy Anne Salz at mSearchGroove where he explains BooRah's methodology in more detail.

Bandaru stresses that the site still Alpha and that there is still some missing functionality but I think it's actually pretty good. I tried a few searches for specific restaurants and found BooRah useful. Unlike Yelp, Boorah seems very good at accurately locating the closest restaurants to a specific address, zip code or intersection. It found over a dozen of sushi places within 3 miles of my house. BooRah reviews tend to be somewhat dry and factual ... More

A mobile city guide with listings of local bars, clubs, restaurants & events in the U.S. and Canada. Buzzd aggregates listings from Citysearch, Time Out, ZAGAT, Flavorpill, Metromix together with updates from friends and other buzzd members. Source: Tappity

Search for restaurants in most U.S. metropolitan areas. Results, which seem to be limited to places listed in the Michelin guidebooks, include address, click to call phone number and maps. 

There are links to Michelin reviews but registration is required to view them.  Basic registration is free but limits you to 10 reviews per month, unlimited access is $2.50/month.  The concise reviews average 130 words and include price range and star rating. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Mogoso is a search site that simultaneously searches Yelp for stores and restaurants and also does an Amazon shopping search. The results link to reviews Amazon or Yelp reviews. I find Mogoso's search interface and results pages cleaner and and easier to navigate than either Amazon's or Yelp's. For one thing, searching for restaurants by zip code actually works on Mogoso by returning results by distance, Yelp first returns results sorted by rating from throughout the metropolitan area, you have to click a link and wait to find the nearest ones.
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Go2 is a pioneering location based mobile search engine that's been on the mobile web since 1999. It's is a local entertainment guide that helps people find concerts, local events, movies, tv listings, sports, restaurants, bars, and their daily horoscopes.

Guide to Restaurants, Bars, Nightclubs, Tourist Attractions, Movie Theaters, Concerts and Events for any US city or town. Listings include click to call phone numbers and links to maps and driving directions. Nicely done site but too many links lead to pages with no listings. Source Mobility.mobi

UrbanDaddy has information on nightlife, restaurants and bars in New York, Los Angeles,San Francisco, Chicago, Miami and Las Vegas along with insider information on US and International travel. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory.

Eater NY covers the  New York City restaurant, bar, and nightlife scene with staff reviews, insider interviews and user-generated tips, rants and raves.  Mobile view by Mobify.

A very comprehensive guide to New York City's Upper East Side. Find businesses by category, search nearby businesses by selecting a street block as a center-point. Also announcements, discounts at local businesses, events and reviews. I wish the phone numbers in listings were click to call though.

Guide to events, shopping, hotels, restaurants, hotels and events in Washington D.C.'s Golden Triangle business district. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

The official mobile site of the Orange County, Florida Health Department lists services and clinics with hours of operation, maps, driving directions and click to call numbers.  Source: Mobility.mobi

Guide to dinning, movies and events in Tucson, Arizona.

Restaurant guide, restaurant reviews, shops guide, arts and entertainment calendar, nightlife and bars guide for Minneapolis St Paul, Minnesota. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Information and services for all Indiana University campuses. Announcements, staff and student directory, event listings and bus schedules.  Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

 

A visitors guide and merchant directory for Studio City, CA - a district of Los Angeles.

Mobile edition of a continuously updated to Los Angeles nightlife, clubs,shopping, dining, upcoming events, and the latest celebrity gossip. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Business directory for Tulsa, Oklahoma.  Listings include description, address, click to call number, an email contact form and a map.  There are also coupons for some businesses and Tulsa job listings. CSS positioned two column layout renders poorly on older S40 phones, Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Guide to restaurants shopping, art, entertainment, nightlife, transit  and events in downtown Raleigh NC. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Slick interactive map of Hong Kong. Search by address or building name or browse for public facilities like schools, libraries and government offices. The maps are very high quality, scrollable and with four levels of zoom. You can toggle the display of icons showing the location nearby ATMs, Banks, stores and Karaokes! on the maps. Clicking an icon give details about businesses. The side is designed for Pocket PC's but is usable with Opera Mini except that clicking the icons , which relies on an image map, doesn't work.

Capetown, South Africa event calendar and local entertainment news. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

Guide to galleries, restaurants and events in Johannesburg, South Africa.  Source Oh! Mobile Directory

Local entertainment news and guide to entertainment, nightlife, events, exhibitions, theatre and restaurants for Durban, South Africa. Source: Oh! Mobile Directory

An online magazine about London with news, event listings, reviews of art, theatre, concerts, exhibits, galleries, pubs and restaurant. Source: Taptu Touch Web Report

Similar to Yelp but for the UK only, Qype UK offers a directory of user generated reviews of local businesses such as restaurants, stores and hotels. Again like Yelp, Qype is a community incorporating elements of social networking like messaging, friends lists and a reputation system.

Dublinbikes is a bicycle sharing system where bikes are available at a number of automated bike stations around Dublin, Ireland. The bikes can be used for 30 minutes for free and can be rented for longer trips. They can be returned to any bike station, handy for point to point trips. The bikes and supporting infrastructure are  provided at not cost to the city of Dublln by France's JC Decaux, the maker of the famous Paris Sanisette automatic self cleaning toilets. In return for the bikes, Decaux is allowed to install a specified number of outdoor advertising signs and kiosks. It's a nice idea, helping to decrease traffic congestion and carbon emissions as well as encouraging a healthier lifestyle. For users it provides a convenient alternative to driving or public transit and seems generally well received .

One problem with the bike sharing system is that each station has spaces for a fixed number of bikes. When all the spaces are full bikes can not be returned to that station. To help solve that problem, dotMobi's Ronan Cremin developed dublinbikes.mobi, a mashup of Google Maps and data from the official Dublinbikes Website. It displays the availability of bikes and bike parking spaces at all of Dublin's bike stations on a map of the city. Users find a nearby bike to use at the start of a trip and an open bike station to drop it off near their destination.

 

Another winner from dotMobi's internal mobile site building competition, Ronan Cremin's tjamm is the ultimate mobile commuting guide - as long as your commute is in Dublin. The site includes a traffic map, live audio and SMS traffic alerts, real time commuter rail arrivals, schedules and route maps for all Dublin bus lines and a weather forecast for the next 32 days. Very cool, Every city should have a tjamm.

A full-featured guide to Brisbane, Australia published by the Brisbane City Council and built from the Council's full site using a forms based mobile site builder from MyAnswers. There's a wealth of information on the site including library locations and hours, a library catalog search, events calendar, information on recycling, city dumps, transit, traffic, bike hire locations, boat ramps, swimming pools, skateboard parks and tennis courts. There's even a form to search the city's cemeteries for the location of a  grave and a "fixogram" form to report problems with roads, and storm drains, etc. Source: Mobility.mobi

Directory of over 100 US local search and directory sites. Each site covers a single city or town. All have local business search, some also include classifieds, local news and weather.  Directory listings include address, map and click to call numbers.

A nice WAP2 guide for travelers. Wcities covers cities on all continents with listings of restaurants, lodging, bars, public transportation (bus, train, taxi) current weather and sights to see. Coverage of the United States is particularly extensive with 94 cities covered including relatively small places like Buffalo, Branson, MO and Sacramento. The listings of individual establishments are quite detailed with current prices and a brief description. The descriptions read more like something written the venue's marketing person than an impartial review.

Outside the US, coverage is not as complete, only 9 cities in France, 7 in China, 8 in Mexico and only four in South Africa which is the only nation covered in Africa. There is still a lot of detail for the covered cities, more than 80 budget Paris hotels are listed, for example.

The sites usability is lessened because of rather slow load times.

The newest mobile site from MobiSolv, the company behind mVies (movie listings) and oFFrz (shopping coupons).Grubz is a dining out and nightlife guide for Delhi, India with listings of restaurants, lounge and cafes searchable by keyword and by cuisine.

Guide to the best restaurant, hotels, night life and attractions by city for over 3,500 cites around the world. There are multiple categories so "10 best restaurants" is not just the most expensive places in town but the 10 best Indian, 10 best cheap eats etc. Search, directions and brief, but in my experience, accurate reviews make this an outstanding site.

Worldwide restaurant listings. No reviews, just a listing of restaurant names and phone numbers by county and city.

A guide to Canada's Nova Scotia province for visitors and residents. NSMOBILE contains area and town information including emergency phone numbers, business, dinning and lodging directories and links to local news and weather mobile sites.