Dish.fm, the recently relaunched restaurant recommendation app which focuses on the best menu items, as opposed to overall venue reviews, is today rolling out an update which expands the service into more of a dish search engine than local utility. The company had previously allowed you to see the best dishes nearby and compare dishes inside a restaurant, but now the app also helps you find the… → Read More
Ness, the restaurant recommendations app that uses social data combined with machine-learning techniques to offer personalized suggestions, has released the next major version of its application today, now focused on what it’s calling “instant recommendations.” In the earlier version, Ness relied on user-initiated searches and a setup wizard that asked users to select their… → Read More
Yahoo! has acquired Jybe, the company announced today via a post to its corporate blog. Jybe is a startup founded in 2011 by three ex-Yahoo! employees, including Arnab Bhattacharjee, who was VP of Yahoo! Search Technology when he departed the company. The startup’s mission was to help connect people to the physical world around them, a mission for which it released an iPhone app late last year to… → Read More
Hubbl, the app discovery service built by former TechCrunch Disrupt finalists, has introduced an interesting new feature today for users of its iPhone version: Passbook integration. To get started, you simply visit a link (hubbl.io/passbook) from mobile Safari, in order to add a pass to Apple’s Passbook which will then send you a new app deal every day. The Passbook feature will also be added to a… → Read More
Posse, a local discovery platform for web and mobile, is today arriving in the U.S. and making its iPhone app debut. The company has also just raised another $500,000 in additional funding from existing investors including Lars Rasmussen, Google Maps creator and currently Facebook’s Director of Engineering, as well as Silicon Valley angel investor Bill Tai. Rasmussen also sits on the… → Read More
Arro, a new mobile shopping companion app for iPhone, is publicly launching this week with a different idea about how to help shoppers in store aisles make a quick decision on whether or not to buy. Instead of focusing on price matching or personalized product recommendations, the app gives users a shortlist of the top five choices, based on its analysis of millions of online reviews. → Read More
Its name may not be familiar, but Zedge has become one of the most popular Android apps out there. Offering personalized content and game discovery along with free ringtones and wallpaper, the app currently sits in the ninth spot among Google Play’s free apps, placing it between familiar names, like Netflix and Twitter. Over the last three years, Zedge has seen over 50 million installs on Android… → Read More
Dish.fm is a new restaurant recommendation mobile application, launching today, which focuses on helping users find the best dishes at their local eateries. Initially, the company had gone the Foodspotting route, debuting an early version of the app this summer which relied on crowd-sourcing techniques to fill its database with photos and reviews. But just a month after the app went live in the… → Read More
Startup founders are apparently still holding out hope for the social recommendations space, and today, yet another app has launched with its own take on mobile opinion sharing. After three months in private beta, Knotch has officially opened its doors to the public. → Read More
In the world of restaurant recommendations, the focus these days is squarely on social recommendations. Nara, which is launching its mobile apps for iOS and Android today, is taking a different approach. The service tries to learn your preferences and uses its own set of proprietary algorithms to give you personalized recommendations. → Read More
As the Web evolves and hundreds of sites collect data every day on who we are and what we love to do, personalization has become fundamental to user experience to help users find signal amidst the noise. Some companies utilize our social graph to provide recommendations from the people we trust, while others mine Big Data, incoming data from APIs and more. The problem, however, is that most… → Read More
Roamz, a startup which recently relaunched its mobile applications with a new focus on local search (as opposed to serendipitous discovery), is now bringing its local search engine to the web. Today, the company is debuting an online version of its service at Roamz.com, allowing users to view real-time content about nearby places and events, search for specific things, like coffee or shopping… → Read More
Vineloop, a social recommendations platform which first launched into beta late last year, is today relaunching its mobile app for iPhone offering a completely redesigned user interface, additional categories, a favoriting function and more. And while, yes, there are quite a lot of mobile apps on the market promising to provide the best line-up of recommendations from your friends, Vineloop at… → Read More
Decide.com, the shopping search engine that tells consumers both what and when to buy, is introducing its premium level of service today. Starting now, Decide.com will begin to charge for its “when to buy” recommendations – the recommendations which serve as Decide.com’s distinguishing feature versus the other shopping search services on the market currently. → Read More
This just in: online recommendations and listings site Yelp is stepping up its international push and buying its biggest rival in Europe, Qype. It will pay €18.6 million for all of Qype’s shares and is adding another 970,000 shares of Yelp’s Class A common stock, for a total purchase price of approximately $50 million. Qype is headquartered in Germany, with operations across Europe. Combined… → Read More
Plenty of startups still believe there’s room in the social recommendations space, and now, another new contender heads into battle. Chicago-based Mouthee is today officially debuting its website and iOS application, which allow users to quickly share reviews of local restaurants and hotels, as well as movies, music and books. → Read More
Preen.me, a Tel Aviv-based social beauty startup, is today announcing having closed on a healthy $800,000 round of seed funding led by Genesis Partners. The round also saw participation from Li Ka-Shing’s Horizons Ventures as well as individual investor Oren Zeev. First launched as a Facebook fan community a year ago, then later expanding into an online website for beauty and makeup tips and how… → Read More
Livestar, which is officially launching at TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco today, wants to help you find personalized recommendations from your friends and authoritative sources around the web. Livestar, which is currently only available on the iPhone, argues that most of the major review sites like Yelp and Amazon are due for disruption, because they don’t offer personalized ratings and… → Read More
London-based Top10 has had a busy first year, with a September 2011 launch for their original web service announced alongside a $3.5 million Series A round, and then a Spotify app released in January that has so far seen users share over a million song recommendations. Now, the startup is refocusing on its web roots, with a new update that changes the focus slightly, away from user curated top… → Read More
Even in our age of Yelp and Google Places, finding the right restaurant can often be hard. In April, Hoppit launched its “ambiance search engine for restaurants” to make it easier to find a nice spot that fits not just your culinary preferences but also your mood. Today, after a bit of a delay, the company is launching its redesigned website and its iPhone app. Just like its website, the mobile… → Read More
Decide.com, the shopping engine that tells you when to buy, is expanding into a new frontier: it’s now going to tell you what to buy, too. The service, launched last summer by former Farecast engineers following that company’s acquisition, has come a long way since its original debut where it was positioned as an electronics-only shopping service. Today, Decide offers “buy or wait”… → Read More
Apptera, the mobile communications and ad company backed by $30 million from Alloy, Lightspeed Ventures, and others, is today launching a second mobile app to join what had been, until now, its flagship product: the Android dialer replacement, Poptuit, which debuted around this time last year.
The new app is a friend-powered recommendation engine called Raved, and it’s available first for iOS. → Read More
Tout’d, a New York-based startup that describes itself as a “digital word-of-mouth social media platform and referral engine,” today announced that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round led by Warner Hill Angels. This round also included participation by the service’s founders and 25 third-party investors. The company says that it plans to use this money to “accelerate growth, enhance the user… → Read More
Berlin-based Foundd is a new movie recommendation service launching this week, which not only finds you movies you would like to watch, but also helps a group decide on a movie they can watch together. It’s an interesting twist on the concept of personalized recommendation engines, like those created by Netflix or Amazon, for example, which seemingly presume that watching movies is a solitary… → Read More
With so much information, content and so many services now living online, there’s a lot of choice — even for something as simple as where to go to buy a new pair of socks. Oh, and there’s a lot of data. As it’s evolved and gotten better at making sense of its new Big Data, the Web has become an extraordinary engine for discovering new stuff: News, cat videos, porn, you name it. Naturally, scores… → Read More
Well it looks like Google just can’t wait for the start of its Developer Conference tomorrow to begin sharing news. It’s been a while since we’ve seen any development of the company’s now ubiquitous “+1″ button, but beginning soon, your +1s are going to get a whole lot more useful (and creepy?). Tonight, Google announced via the Google+ Developers Blog that it is rolling out a new feature in… → Read More
We’ve just been given a first look at Saga, a new mobile companion emerging from Seattle startup A.R.O. You can think of Saga as Siri’s little sister, perhaps. Instead of asking it questions or giving the app simple tasks (what’s the weather, add meeting calendar, e.g.), Saga is there, quietly tracking your behavior, your location and learning about your preferences, in order to make smarter… → Read More
No plans yet for the weekend? Good! Here’s something you should try then: Eventster is a new app for iPhone and iPad launching today which is tackling local event recommendations. The app pulls in 600,000 events per day across North America and Europe via the Zvents API (now a part of StubHub), offering activities like concerts, festivals, nightlife hotspots, theater showtimes, sports events, and… → Read More
If you’re following Foursquare on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed that the check-in champions have been teasing the release of the “all new Foursquare” app for the last few days, dropping hints that it was coming soon to app stores near you.
Continuing to use the hashtag #allnew4sq, Foursquare last night dropped the news on Twitter that it will be releasing its big new redesign at some point… → Read More
Twitter does a lot of things right, but it still hasn’t solved the problem of turning its noise into signal. After joining Twitter, it can take a lot of following and unfollowing scores of accounts before you’ve curated a stream that makes sense for you. With its platform growing fast, Twitter is looking to make the onboarding process a little easier (and more personalized) for new users, which is… → Read More
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