Yelp LBS reviews. SpotExample mobileComfort Inn. Contact Theatre - Manchester. Wall to wall creativity. Whilst we were waiting for the auditorium to open a band played in the cafe for our amusement. Man on keyboards, man on guitar - songs we knew, songs they'd written - nice. Impressive range of continental beers and some of the most delicious melt-in-the-mouth-sexy chocolate cake to ever pass these hungry lips. Then they allowed us into the plush, spacey auditorium. Comfort. First to take to the stage were a local outfit called Starless and Bible Black - devastating torch songs augmented by laptop effects. Had an argument with the guy sat in front of me who insisted that they sounded exactly like Hawkwind. Next act was The Magic Arm, one of those "I can play multiple instruments at once using delay pedals" musicians. Then the man himself - the king, the godfather, the virtuoso - the man who knows things - James Yorkston, himself, in the flesh, there he is!
What a wonderful evening! Unwise to review based on but one show? Cube - Manchester - M1 6FB. Said friends told me that the museum was free so I walked in and began to wander around the current exhibition, 'Alan Fletcher: fifty years of graphic work (and play)'. This comprehensive exhibition includes the British graphic designer's original sketches, posters, objects and archive footage spanning Fletcher's work from his student days at the RCA to the playful and more personal work he created after leaving Pentagram in 1992. I had a little look around the exhibition, which seemed really interesting, even to me, who has no idea whatsoever about design.
However, I was then stopped by a member of staff who told me it was £4 to view the exhibits (£3.50 for students). He didn't mind when I told him I wasn't *that* interested in this guy's work, and the friendly man gave me several sheets of A4 paper telling me about Fletcher's work to take home with me. CentralPublic Library - Manchester - M2 5PD. OK, seriously, you guys, joking aside, this is one of the most lovely beautiful libraries I have ever been to.
The architecture is, as has been pointed out before, breathtaking, but not in a hugely obtrusive way. I've always found that, despite sitting on busy St Peter's Square, a mere-stone's throw from the hustle and bustle of Piccadilly Gardens, this round giant imposes a sense of peace on its surroundings, kind of like a cathedral. Maybe that's just because, to me, a library is more suited for worship than a church.
And here, you can worship all the literary deities. And once you've got the right book, why would you want to take it back to your messy flat, with your boyfriend playing on his loud SNES, while the cat chases a receipt across the floor and the small French child upstairs throws a wobbler? The computers here, as with alllll public-access machines, are slow and a bit behind the times, but totally adequate for use. Cross Street Chapel - Manchester - M2 1NL. Deaf Institute - Manchester. Time was, I could spend hours on end in the DI. Eating the lovely Trof nosh and drinking the Trof lager and generally being louche and lazy.
Then of course night would fall, and we'd move on to the wine. They were good days, but recently I've felt something's missing. Now, the clubnights and gigs are still fantastic. They get really great DJs and recent gigs have included These New Puritans (yeah, still knocking around) and the huge upcoming Marina and the Diamonds all for around £10 a ticket. The cocktail bar downstairs also still has it. I wish, I truly do, that I could put my finger on what has changed about DI to make me not love it anymore, but I can't. SpotExample Hotel Comfort. MassMedia categry/Group. London Events, Concerts, Film, Nightlife, Festivals & More | Yel. London Recent Talk. Larissa D.'s Reviews | London. Google To AcquireYelp For A Half Billion Dollars. Yelp Scoble video. Yelp is an online source for consumer reviews that is growing at a rate of about one million unique users a month and is seen as the place to find out about businesses ranging from doctors to restaurants from people who have used the services or eaten the food.
Revenue comes from advertisers looking for that consumer audience known as Yelpers who write the positive and negative reviews. The idea for the company founded in 2004 in San Francisco, Calif, began with a question faced by many people, says Luther Lowe, manager of local business outreach at Yelp: “How do you find a trustworthy doctor online if you’re moving to a new city?” That question posed by co-founders Jeremy Stoppelman and Russel Simmons has generated more than seven million consumer reviews posted online at Yelp, which has spread to dozens of cities in 35 states plus Washington, D.C. Lowe shares his insights into what businesses are doing well — and what they can do better.
Links mentioned in this video include: Loopt Into Yelp’s Territory With New Local Reviews Site. Before there was Gowalla or Foursquare, there was location-based social network Loopt. Launched in 2006, Loopt was one of the pioneers of the location-based mobile social network. And Loopt has gained a huge number of users of its mobile apps; the social network currently has 3 million mobile users, 1 million of which are on the iPhone. Compared to Foursquare and Gowalla, which have 150,000 and 50,000 users respectively, Loopt has a pretty significant user base. More recently, Loopt upgraded its mobile offerings to offer a check-in where you can also review a place and help recommend things for your friends to do, called Pulse.
The mobile feature aggregates data on all of these “check-in spots,” which include, bars, restaurants, and more. It’s kind of like a local search engine. Now Loopt is venturing into Yelp’s territory (even as rumors swirl about Yelp) by making these local reviews available on the web. Yelp Walks Away From Google Deal, And Half A Billion Dollars. Jeremy Stoppleman, the CEO of Yelp, has walked away from an all-but-signed deal to be acquired by Google for more than half a billion dollars. The deal was, as we wrote late last week, in the later stages of negotiation. The two companies had agreed on a price – around $550 million plus earnouts – and were working through the final details of the acquisition. Then something happened that made Yelp reconsider the deal. Over the weekend they notified Google that they were not going to sell, say multiple sources. So what made the deal go sideways? We’re working on that. From the information we’ve gathered, there is currently no other suitor seriously looking at the company.
Yelp Says It's Not Afraid of Foursquare. Location based social network Foursquare is the darling of the media's eye these days and appears to be growing very fast. Rumors are growing louder that Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen's venture capital fund is about to invest in the startup and the company now reports that it sees "100,000 new users every 10 days. " Is old-school local social network Yelp scared? No, says Eric Singley, Yelp's Director of Consumer and Mobile Products.
Singley told us he finds Foursquare's user numbers "hard to quantify" and said "they don't blow my mind. " Yelp Mobile is Already Big Starting tonight, local businesses that have created free accounts and claimed their listings on Yelp will receive additional analytics specific to mobile user traffic: the number of times they've shown up in mobile search, the number of times mobile users have clicked to call them by telephone and the number of times users have clicked for directions to their business. Yelp Takes Up to $100 Million in New Funding. Local reviews powerhouse Yelp has announced that it’s taking a $25 million investment from Elevation Partners, who will also “seek to increase its total investment in Yelp to $100 million through a planned purchase of shares from vested employees and other eligible shareholders,” according to a statement from the company.
The investment comes at a time when local is red hot, with Yelp looking to capitalize further on it by expanding its mobile presence across platforms and introducing features like “check-ins” that help lend credibility to user reviews. The company cites mobile app development as one of its uses for the new funding, and an updated Android app with check-in features is expected within the next couple weeks. Yelp says that it passed 26 million unique visitors in December, while we recently reported that the site now features more than 9 million total user reviews. Yelp Brings Location Check-in Data to Its Web Reviews. Last week, the battle for your check-ins took an interesting new turn as Yelp rolled out a set of location features for its iPhone app.
Today, Yelp’s expanding the feature to include check-in information alongside user reviews on its website. With that small step, you can see exactly why check-ins are such a big deal for Yelp, and a big threat to upstarts like Foursquare and Gowalla. We’re told that Yelp just passed nine million reviews, and now, with the ability to connect check-in data to individual reviews, the company is hoping to add further credibility to its users’ ratings. In the example below, you can see that the user has checked in five times to the gym he's giving a five-star favorable review to and has earned the status of “regular,” which makes you know he isn't just making it up (well, he still could be, but it would require a bit more effort): Along those lines, next up for Yelp is adding check-in functionality to other mobile platforms.
Yelp Adds Checkin Metrics to Business Reports. Beginning today, Yelp will provide business owners using the service with free mobile metrics that includes data on mobile checkins. The additional metrics will now be included in the weekly newsletter — Your Business on Yelp — that business owners receive every Tuesday. Mobile metrics will represent the user activity taking place in Yelp Mobile apps. This data could prove to be a very insightful supplemental for business users, especially given that 27% of all Yelp searches occur from within the Yelp iPhone app. The following are the mobile metrics that business owners will now receive: Number of times their business is viewed via a Yelp mobile appHow many calls were made to their business via a Yelp mobile appDirections to their business requested via a Yelp mobile appCheck-ins The mobile metrics will help Yelp remain competitive with Foursquare's business dashboard, which provides business owners who claim their venue with checkin analysis.
[img credit: Yelp] Yelp Catch Anti-Google Wave? December 30, 2009 by wilsonllkerr Wilson Kerr is the founder of LBS consulting firm Location Based Strategy, LLC. On December 21st, as we all got ready for the 2009 Holiday “unplug”, it was reported that local business rating and review information aggregator Yelp rejected a hefty $500+Million takeover offer from Google. Bold move, but why did they walk away? No one seems to be certain. Yelp’s window stickers tell a tale of building local merchant trust and a lot of grunt work by “boots on the ground”. By this I mean the literal and figurative wearing out of shoe leather for the purpose of winning over single-door business owners one by one. Google is the powerhouse leader in the race for infusing local business information into maps and they seem to be rolling out new programs on a weekly basis. By the way, I recently blogged about Google’s Favorite Places as a new program, but was in San Francisco last week and spotted a real, life-sized Google “map blob” on the sidewalk!
Like this: Yelp R.I.P? – GigaOM. Om’s note: I wrote this long before the rumors about Google buying Yelp for $500 million started flying around. In my post from today that breaks down the Yelp-Google deal, I explain why it is a good move for Yelpers to take the money and run. I also say that it is a good move for Google in the short term. Over the long term, value of Yelp is limited. The cold and damp December weather has taken hold here in San Francisco. It’s the kind of weather that forces you to stay indoors and hang out with friends — and find comfort in warm food. I typically don’t eat out thanks to some diet restrictions, but occasionally it’s good to break the rules.
My friends and I settled on piping hot ramen noodles, but couldn’t agree on where to get them. Once there, I turned on Foursquare to log my whereabouts (aka “check in”) with the service and, as expected, found some great tips on what to order. Like Liz, I once would have turned to Yelp in order to make such a decision. Not Only Is Google Places Going After Yelp, They’re Doing So With Yelp’s Content. Earlier today, we noted that an update to Google Maps for Mobile was the clearest sign yet of Google going directly after Yelp. But it’s actually even more interesting than we thought.
Key to the new Google Maps for Mobile is Places, the new establishment-centric area which Google has been building up for about the past year or so. Places is basically an evolution of Google Local, which had been around for some time to pull in the best content for various local businesses. Previously, with Google Local, Google was using content they licensed to populate their review excerpts area. And not only that, Yelp data often constitutes a lot of the review content. Google actually used to have a partnership with Yelp to use their licensed content (read: customer reviews) a few years back, we hear.
And that’s what’s so interesting here. And that’s the key to all of this. Obviously, the ramifications of this go far beyond Yelp.