Yelp is in a very nice spot: local data, and especially review data, is one of the killer apps on mobile phones.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You're going to pull out your phone and try to use whatever is the most appropriate app on your iPhone or your Android device. Yelp saw that very early on. And when we launched the mobile product, we saw immediate growth, and we were stunned.
Where folks like Google have fallen down is in just putting a little review box up, then closing their eyes and letting the algorithm take care of itself. Yelp is a technology company, but also a company that understands how people want to connect with one another.
I live on my phone: I have a bunch of news and informational apps on there.
Yelp has been in this business since it really became something worth thinking about in 2004, when the transition started happening from the world of the Yellow Pages to the world of searching online for local information.
I really think the app store is kind of the killer app for Apple and for Google.
If we all went to Google right now, or went to Yelp right now, we'd all get the same results, and that seems really, really broken to me. Foursquare should understand the neighborhoods I've spent a lot of time in, and the restaurants that I went to once but never went back to.
When you read reviews on Yelp, you get a good sense of what's going to happen when you walk in the door of that business. The challenge is that there are fifteen million businesses in the U.S., and its very hard to communicate with all of them about how Yelp works, and why it works the way it does.
Throughout the day, I frequently use my iPhone to check 'Deadline Hollywood' and my Twitter feed, as well as the 'Daily Beast,' the 'New York Times,' 'Metsblog,' and 'Thejetsblog.'
On mobile, what are the core apps? It's basically messaging, mapping and review data.
In the very beginning, Yelp started as a service where we really didn't think people would write reviews for fun. The whole concept of user-generated content was pretty nascent in 2004.
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