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.

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

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.

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

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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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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A very powerful mobile application with a slightly strange interface. It lets you find nearby business no matter where you are in the USA. Here's how I use it. First, you need to set up an account which you do on the mobile page by choosing login. If you phone supports cookies you'll never have to login again. Next, set your start point. The easiest way is by entering the phone number of a nearby business which you can find on a merchant's street sign. If your not in a business district you will have to enter the cross streets or address. Next, choose search and either choose a catergory from the list or type a business name. You can also search for a catergory by typing a catergory name but that can seem rather hit or miss as many things which seem like obvious catergories aren't. The secret is that the catergories are the ones in the telephone yellow pages. In fact the whole application seems to be based on a phone directory database. Once you find what you are looking for, you can get directions or call the business. You can save both start points and destinations. GoTo distinquishes between Saved Start Points and saved destinations which it calls Favorites. You can't use a Start Point as a Favorite or vice versa unfortunately, so I often end up saving the save location as both. In spite of it's quirks, I find GoTo to be the single most usefull WAP site on my phone. I use it constantly to get directions and find shops and restaurants.Go2 is a site with great potential marred by a clumsy UI and somewhat slow response. Still if you are patient and learn it's quirks it can be very useful. It's location based search that since 1999 has worked on any phone. And it's worked in spite of the mobile providers reluctance to expose their LBS data to mobile web developers or users. Of course, the reason it works is because it relies on the old fashioned method of the user entering their current location as the first step of a search. Go2 helps you find the closest restaurant, coffee shop, hardware store or any other type of business by name or type of business. Unfortunately, it's for the US only.

I find Go2 to be a very powerful and useful tool. As I mentioned already, I think Go2's user interface is rather un-intuitive.

Here's how to get started with Go2 with a minimum amount of frustration. First, you should set up an account. Go2 can be used without registering for an account but you won't be able to save locations. You can create an account on the mobile site but you have to enter quite a bit of information. If at all possible, I recommend creating your Go2 account on your computer.

Once you have an account, log on with your phone. Go2 uses a persistent cookie so you should only need to log in the first time you use Go2. Now you are ready to search. I recommend that you don't start with the first link on Go2's home page (First 2 images), enticingly labeled "Search". To me that option should really be called "Advanced Search", it's powerful but rather un-intuitive in the way it works. Instead use "Dining" if you are looking for a restaurant, "Go2 Movies" to find what's showing when at nearby theatres or "Popular Searches" for anything else.

The first time you perform a search, Go2 forces you to set a start point which becomes your default starting point until you change it. You can change your starting point at anytime using the "Starting Points" link at the bottom of every screen on most browsers. Go2 gives you a lot of ways to enter your starting point (fourth and fith images). You can enter a full street address along with a zip code or city state combination, or just a zip code or city/state although that will only localize the results to some arbitrary location in that city or zip. My favorite way of entering locations on the phone is by phone number. If I'm in a business district many of the shops will have their phone number on their signs. Entering a phone number on a phone keypad is of course ridiculously easy compared with triple-tapping or T9'ing a street address. As long as it's a listed number, Go2 can do a reverse lookup to find the address and geolocate you based on that address. When traveling, I use my hotel's phone number to add it to my starting points. Starting points are automatically saved as long as you are loged in.

When you perform a search, Go2 will return a list of matching businesses sorted by distance from your starting point (sixth image). Once you select one of the search results , you can get turn by turn driving directions (last image) or call the business by clicking a WTAI enabled link (seventh image). Directions are from Navtech the same company that supplies Google and Yahoo's driving directions, however there are no maps. You also save the destination as a favorite which allows you to get directions back to it from anywhere.

When you travel to a new location you can bring up a list of saved starting points (fifth image) from "My Account" on the front page or from "Starting Points" at the bottom of every page on WAP2 browsers or on an soft key with Openwave WAP1 browsers and select one that is near your current location.

You can save both starting points and destinations. Go2 distinguishes between saved Starting Points and saved destinations which it calls "Favorites" You can't use a Start Point as a Favorite or vice versa but you can add a copy of a favorite location to your Starting Points. I often end up saving the same location as both. You can manage starting points and favorites at Go2.com on your computer.

To get directions to a favorite location, bring up favorites from "My Account" on the front screen, choose "Locations", then the location you want directions to.

There is a lot to Go2. Although I've warned that the "Search" link is not the best place to start, there are plenty of goodies to discover there as well as under the other links on the main page. Here's a little cheat sheet to all of Go2.

1. Search: As I mentioned above, think of this as "Advanced Search". It leads to the main search page where you can search by keying a business name which works very well. You can also search for a category by typing a category name or by choosing from a list of all categories both of which I find frustrating. Searching by typing a category name can seem rather hit or miss as many things which seem like obvious categories like sushi or espresso aren't. I think the secret is that the categories are the ones in the telephone yellow pages. In fact the whole application seems to be based on a phone directory database. Ideally Go2 should recognize synonyms like "espresso" for "coffee shops" and "sushi" for "Japanese Restaurants". The problem with choosing a category from a list is that the alphabetical list is very long, 5 screen fulls and there is no way to jump to a particular letter. You have to scroll and click through most of the screens to get to "Real Estate" for example. It would be better if there was a "A-D", "E-H"... menu.

2. Popular Searches: common categories like restaurants, florists, coffee shops, banks hotels and gas stations along with entries labeled "Shopping" and "Local Info". Shopping is subdivided into a couple of screens of categories like apparel, bicycles, electronics and malls. Local Info has emergency services, post offices, churches and taxis. "Popular Searches" along with "Dining" is where I do most of my searches

3. Dining: lists the nearest restaurants of various types. You can choose "All Restaurants" to find the nearest restaurant of any type or select a link for a specific cuisine like Chinese, Italian, etc.

4. Go2 Movies: search for the nearest theater and get a list of current attractions and show times or find the nearest theatres showing a particular film. There is also a section of well written movie reviews with star ratings.

5.Travel: Hotels, Trains, Buses, Car Rental, Airlines. Mostly useful although Buses tends to return listings of the headquarters of tour bus companies rather than where to actually catch a bus or call for transit info.

6. Fun Stuff: Horoscopes, Entertainment News and a Dating Service.

7. Weather: (both localized and for any US zip) and airline delay information (not localized)

8. My Account: Starting Points, Favorites and Customize, which is the only place on the phone where you can delete a starting point or location (took me months to discover). "Log out" is also only found under "My Account".

There is a "system" menu with links to the Go2 Home, Search, Start Points, Set Radius and Favorites pages at the bottom of every screen on WAP2 phones. On WAP1 browsers the system menu uses wml "do" tag which works great on Openwave WAP1 browsers where pressing the menu key cycles though the "do" options on the phone's soft keys. On Nokia and most other wml browsers these choices will be buried at the bottom of the "Options" menu tied to the left soft key. To make matters worst these site specific options are usually listed below all the browser's built in options like bookmarks etc. This is not convenient and most users will never even find them. Go2 should use browser detection and give non-Openwave WAP1 devices a link to a system menu at the bottom of every page.

Go2 seems to be having some capacity issues lately. I get occasional timeouts on my Boost phone (Nextel/Boost's gateway will timeout if it doesn't get a response in 30 seconds) and I also see a "Sorry, we are experiencing extremely high traffic right now. Please try again later." message fairly often.

Although I been rather critical of some aspects of Go2, I still find Go2 to be the single most useful WAP site on my phone. I use it constantly to get directions and find shops and restaurants.

I don't know of any other mobile local search site that does as good a job of managing your location. In fact the only other one I've seen that allows multiple saved starting locations is Yahoo Local and it's location handling is vastly inferior to Go2's. Yahoo limits you to a maximum of 10 saved locations which you have to set up on the full web. However, only the first six saved locations are available on Yahoo's mobile web page!

The great things about Go2 are it's capacity for storing many locations and allowing you to switch you starting point at any time when you are on the move and that it returns results by proximity to your current starting point. Go2 would make a great truly location aware application if only it had access to the location information that the cellular providers are now required to track under E911. Go2 is on most of the US cellular provider's mobile portals so the alliances are there. I would think that Go2 would be in a perfect position to persuade the carriers to share location data with them - with the subscriber's permission of course. If Go2 cleaned up their UI and was truly location aware it would be a true break-though application that I think virtually everyone in the US would want to use.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

 

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

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.

AOL City Guides seems to be AOL's 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 City Guides but compared to Digital City there are far ewer listings and superficial descriptions instead of real reviews.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Dayton' Ohio's guide to events, bars, clubs movies and music. Source Oh! Mobile Directory

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

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.

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.