Tag: YELP

For everything we do now -- from scheduling a mover to choosing a restaurant for a first date -- we turn to the Web. Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Citysearch and even Google immediately pull up reviews and hear what the collective voice of the Internet has to say. In fact, when scheduling a doctor, your author crosschecks what her insurance provides with what the consensus says; negative reviews are ...

Yelp has officially added "hipster" to its stable of listing descriptors. Yes, that's right, the uninformed critics who enjoy reviewing places like post offices and other assorted businesses can now tell you where to go, should you have an aversion to or affection for tight-fitting jeans and neon wayfarers. Look, man, we don't want any mouth-breathing app freaks to tell us what it means to ...

You may be on the road less traveled, but, if you are part of the Android movement, you are ahead of the smartphone curve. The platform's many benefits are offset, though, by real setbacks -- like the fact that Android owners aren't shepherded by the Draconian App Store monitored by the Big Brothers at Apple. We are freer, but we are also subjected to a load of crap, like cross-platform ...

The holidays are expensive enough. Why spend extra cash on tricking out your iPhone with sweet new apps? Besides, there are zillions of selections on the market; how can you even figure out which ones you really need -- or better yet, which ones won't chew through your battery and destroy your phone? Wouldn't it be great if there were a list of iPhone apps that were not only cheap, but essential, ...

Last night, Google launched Hotpot, a recommendation engine that is getting baked into Places, and comes loaded in the latest update to Google Maps for Android. Essentially Google's answer to Yelp, Hotpot connects you with friends so that you can share reviews and recommendations of businesses, such as bars and restaurants. The service takes a number of factors into consideration when making a ...

Techcrunch reports that Yelp has been quietly experimenting by offering local deals to users in a select few cities. In a bit of misplaced hyperbole, the site claims that "Yelp Gears Up to Take on Groupon." But is that the case? No, we don't think so. Yelp reported back to Techcrunch that it had indeed run "a short test in Sacramento" for Papillon Salon. But Yelp also noted that it has "hosted ...

Share Isn't it just so tedious and antiquated to pick up the phone (that thing you get your email from) and dial those awful little numbers, just so you can talk to a bored 19-year-old hostess for a reservation at your favorite restaurant? Yelp and OpenTable seem to think so, because the mega review site and online booking system have teamed together to streamline the whole picking-a-restaurant ...

It's official. Facebook's Instant Personalization sucks, and here's why. Last night, security consultant George Deglin discovered a hole in Facebook's new framework that, if correctly manipulated by a savvy hacker, could share a user's name, e-mail and personal data with everyone else on the social network -- without any action from the targeted user. As TechCrunch explains, this specific scheme ...

Share The first day of Facebook's f8 developer conference got underway yesterday in San Francisco. After welcoming their attendees with a set of ankle bracelets discretely packaged as RFID tags, Mark Zuckerberg & Co. got down to the business of explaining their plans to take over the entire Internet. The RFID devices enabled users to tag themselves in photos and share their location and ...

If you're looking for a great restaurant, you can go to Yelp or any other review site to browse through thousands of individual culinary recommendations. And if you're in the market for a great church, you can do the exact same thing, thanks to a growing number of sites devoted exclusively to consumer-rated houses of prayer. On Churchrater.com, users exchange opinions and insights on their holy ...

Peter Kazanjy is either completely shameless, or the best boss in the world. His new start-up, Unvarnished, is a social networking site for people to go and post critiques of their professional peers. By that, we mean to say that you can hop on the site to slam your former employer for cutting back your vacation days, or publicly sneer at the PR rep who had arugula in his teeth throughout his ...

Under a barrage of accusations that it gives better reviews to companies that advertise on its site, Yelp has spoken out in staunch defense of its policies. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the review site has published a series of blog posts in which it denies any wrongdoing, and argues that many of the false allegations stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of how the site filters reviews ...

Planning lunch or meals with friends can be a royal pain. Nobody can agree on when or where, and, without fail, someone is always forgotten in the shuffle of invite e-mails and text messages. That's where Lunchwalla comes in. The pitch is simple: choose who to invite, select some restaurant options (easier said than done), set the time and day, and hit send. The people you've invited will then ...

Two law firms have filed a class-action lawsuit against Yelp, charging the business review site with conducting unfair business practices, and running an "extortion scheme." According to the suit filed in Los Angeles federal court , Yelp's employees regularly "call businesses demanding monthly payments, in the guise of 'advertising contracts,' in exchange for removing or modifying negative reviews ...

Siri is a new voice search and "virtual assistant" application for the iPhone that takes "natural language" requests and turns them into actionable results. For example, ask Siri "where can I get the best sushi," and it will, using the iPhone's GPS, search Yelp to find recommended sushi restaurants near you. Using Nuance, the same speech-to-text engine that powers popular tools like Jott and ...