For the daily deal obsessed on the go, a Groupon mobile app is simply not enough.
Enter The Dealmap, a daily deal aggregator that is launching its iPhone app this evening. Bringing the functionality of its website to the app store, The Dealmap helps users find the best deals in their area, whether they’re from national retailers, local vendors, crowdsourced or daily deals. With roughly 350,000 live deals in the pipeline per day, this app is the largest deal aggregator in the mobile space— at least for now. A look at the app ahead. → Read More
Center’d, the service that looks to help you figure out what to do with your day, has released a new iPhone application that lets you tap into the site’s restaurant, event, and activity recommendation engine on the go. The application is free and you can grab it here.
Center’d competes with sites like Yelp and CitySearch, but instead of simply offering text reviews, the service scours the web for reviews and descriptions and performs semantic analysis on them, allowing you to perform more detailed searches than you could on other sites.
In my testing I found the app’s manual search mode, which lets you search by keywords, to be pretty hit-or-miss. During one search for “large portions” Center’d pulled up a list of matching restaurants, but the app didn’t do a good job explaining why it thought they had large portions (you’d expect it to display any relevant text in its database, but it didn’t). → Read More
Center’d, a local activity guide headed by former Yahoo Local GM Jennifer Dulski, is getting a major upgrade today. Alongside a completely revamped homepage, the site is launching a reworked search engine that it says should outperform the keyword searches found on most other local sites.
Center’d has compiled a database of around 1 million entries for various activities, each of which is categorized into a number of intent-based classifications. To do this, the site has spidered through the web analyzing ‘conversations’ taking place around each entry, taking context into account to determine if a review or comment is positive or negative. It then maps out the results in bar graphs, as seen below. Dulski says that this kind of semantic analysis is better than standard keyword search, and it helps eliminate inaccurate matches – for example it would prevent a review that said “this place is not for kids” from appearing under a query for restaurants “for kids”. → Read More
If Yahoo Local were a standalone startup, it might look like Center’d. Partly that is because CEO Jennifer Dulski used to be the general manager in charge of Yahoo Local. Center’d, which publicly launches today, is a mixture of an event-planning/invitation site and a highly targeted local search engine, with a little social networking thrown in. The entire site is set up to do two things: plan and explore. You import your email contacts, put in your zip code, and off you go. There is a calendar view for local events, and a map view for local destinations. The company started out as FatDoor, a failed social network for neighbors. It took the $5.5 million it raised last October from Norwest Venture Partners and Keynote Ventures, and rebooted as Center’d. The chief technology officer is Chandu Thota, previously the lead developer on Microsoft Virtual Earth. I reviewed the site last April: Center’d is both a local search engine and an event-planning application. You can search places for restaurants, hotels, schools, museums, stores, etc., and the results appear on a Google map. There is also a calendar view. Once you connect with friends on the system their events pop up in your searches. And you can also create your own events and get your friends to help decide the details. For instance, things like the location and date can be voted on. Want to have a party by the sea? Ask your invited guests if they’d rather go to Stimson Beach or Montaro Beach, and if next Sunday is better than this Saturday. You can also assign tasks for them to sign up for: bring lobsters, bring wine, bring volleyball. The site is perfectly serviceable and looks like it will do a decent job with both event planning and local search. The interface is heavy on Ajax, with the screen telescoping open as you go through the options. It is very similar to Pingg in that regard, except it is much more limited in what it can do. But Center’d is also not doing anything appreciably different from many other startups on the event-planning side, including Pingg, Socializr, and MyPunchbowl. It does have the local search piece, but so does Yelp, Yahoo, and Google. Still, when you are starting out with FatDoor, anything is an improvement. Since then, the site has been improved. Places can be saved and commented on. And → Read More
Maybe it is just because it had a really bad name. Or maybe it is because nobody really likes their neighbors. Or, if they do, they actually prefer to talk to them in person. Whatever the reason, FatDoor, a social network for neighbors, is closing its doors. We are placing it in the deadpool. Visitors to the site, which sadly never even emerged out of private beta, can now see nothing but unintelligible gobbledy gook. While the site is dead, the company behind it that raised $7 million in venture capital—$5.5 million of which it collected just last November from Keynote Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners—is not. It is rebooting as Center’d, an event planning and neighborhood search site that is still in stealth mode. But don’t worry, I snuck in and took pictures (see below). Fatdoor’s CEO Jennifer Dulski (a former Yahoo exec) and CTO Chandu Thota (a former Microsoft engineer) are still running Center’d. In the “about” page, they acknowledge that “Center’d evolved from a concept (formerly called Fatdoor) that aimed to bring neighbors together in an online community environment.” They also lay out what they hope to accomplish with Center’d: At Center’d, we’ve been thinking about how to solve the challenges that exist in making plans. From the smallest get together, where you just can’t decide on where to eat . . . to the large fundraisers and school activities that require signups and hundreds of emails and weeks of meticulous planning . . .. Hear us out. We can give you the tools you need to easily organize people, places, and times. Using the latest space-age technology, we have concocted features such as: • Polling tools: Enable your guests to take some of the burden of coming to consensus on the place and time to meet. • Task Management and Volunteer Sign-up: Now you can easily get the team you need to do the stuff you need. • Connection management and calendar sharing: Now that you are suddenly so organized, and ready to pull off the perfect girls’ night out/summer camp/grandparents day/birthday party/first date/last date, let’s make sure those who are important to you can view your calendars. But not everyone, and not every event. We can keep a secret. • Explore neighborhoods: We’ll even help you out with finding other places and events. How would you like a view of your world filtered by the → Read More
San Francisco, CA
