Webware

LightPole doesn't think of itself as a search hub, an RSS reader, a mobile apps platform, or a maps source, even though the mobile app, publicly released on Tuesday, is all these things rolled into one.

LightPole's interface is a bit like Viigo's, but instead of hosting various news channels, LightPole (mostly) hosts channels for interactive services, targeting people on the move who are looking for activities around them.

People seeking a nearby hot spot, for example, would open the channel for Hotspotr, which sniffs out W-iFi cafes and other Internet gateways. MappyHour acts similarly for happy hour joints, and Zvents offers listings of local happenings. Perennial favorites Yelp and Yahoo Local are in here, too. LightPole will search your neighborhhood based on your city or postal code, or by using GPS--whether integrated with the phone or as an external device.

Though dealing with divergent channels, LightPole serves up a unified experience, providing both a map view and list view for each search result. People can exert a measure of control over each view, but largely remain passengers. There's the ability to page through options, sort results, share points of interest with a friend, and switch services--from MappyHour to Yelp, for instance--but you'll find no directions engine here. If you follow LightPole's intentions, you'll stick to the adjacent neighborhood and be proficient enough a map-reader to get around.

Saving a point of interest as a favorite leads to the best feature: the catalog of special spots that is your own personalized channel. On LightPole's channel list, it's called My Places. Here you'll find favorites from all partner services gathered in one spot. Best yet, My Places is the only channel that doesn't include an advertising link up top. The location-based advertising model is common for this type of discovery service aggregator, and, as LightPole CEO Doug Klein confirmed, is an ideal framework for serving call-to-action coupons and ads that help businesses attract patrons by proposing a deal.

With its first public release after a year in quiet beta, LightPole's free app looks promising. While not swimming in features, LightPole is fairly easy to use on any Java-enabled phone and delivers reliably predictable results.

With an emphasis on helping content publishers get in front of users, LightPole should also be able to line up more popular partner services. This, along with giving users a degree more control in programming and deleting relevant channels, is crucial as LightPole expands its partner base. While Yelp and Yahoo Local are big wins, other partnerships such as one with The Bathroom Diaries will fall short in shepherding critical mass.

Download LightPole over the air by signing up on www.lightpole.net.

LightPole's navigational secrets
To zoom in while in map mode, press the center key and jog or scroll the center control to the left. Jog it to the right to zoom out. To reset your location, which is represented on a map by a red balloon, pressing the star key (*) will let the balloon follow your navigation to anywhere else on the map. Press the center key again to make the location your new nerve center.

While Yelp, Yahoo Local, Zagat, Michelin and others can provide a fairly clear picture of whether or not an eatery is worth going to, there's another resource called CleanScores that takes a scientific approach--health inspection scores. Since scores are public, CleanScores takes that data along with a track record of all infractions, and turns them into an eye-friendly, searchable database. While only good for San Francisco and Los Angeles residents at the moment, the site is eventually planning to expand out to other parts of the United States.

Hey 50 isn't bad, unless it's out of 100. Using CleanScores you can tell this place is on a downhill slope. You can also see its violations.

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What makes the service really useful (besides finding out your favorite sandwich shop has a rat problem), is that you can get a snapshot of its inspection history that, in most cases, goes back for years. This lets you see if an establishment has mended its ways after doing poorly, or is continuing on a downhill slope of culinary catastrophe like some of the places you see in Kitchen Nightmares.

In addition to the search, which lets you find any place you're looking for, the site keeps a best and worst section that compiles the last three scores of some of the top- and bottom-ranked restaurants. It also has a feature called Sparklines that averages the last five inspections and puts them into a color and size-coded bar with a numerical value. In many cases, some of the infractions won't churn your stomach, but there are others that might make you think twice about going to that local eatery.

To help promote ratings found on CleanScores, its creators have a promotional emblem that lets top-rated restaurants put on the front of their establishments the likes of any other of the award logos you tend to see from popular review services. Each emblem is only good for three months--just in case anything has changed, so people can be guaranteed the score is up to date. Going forward, I'd like to see the service partner with some user-generated sites like Yelp and Yahoo Local to add an extra layer of usefulness, since knowing how good a place's French toast is can sometimes be just as important as knowing if it might be coming with a side of cockroaches.

Grayboxx is a local recommendations service that's been quietly humming along since 2005. This morning they added 100 cities to the network, bringing the grand total up to 175. Grayboxx takes aggregate customer reviews from all over, and combines them by neighborhood to serve up business recommendations, kind of like what Google has done with its search results. Grayboxx will scour the internet for references to a business (be it tagged photos, or mentions in a blog post), and give that business a certain rank based on its pervasion. However unlike Yelp and Yahoo Local, which are designed and organized to feed off user reviews, Grayboxx's algorithm is completely automatic.

What makes the service particularly interesting is that it's largely unavailable in major U.S. cities right now. For instance, New York, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle won't be getting the Grayboxx treatment until December, while many smaller towns are fully listed. Grayboxx's CEO has previously mentioned that the reason for this was to avoid head-to-head competition with other services like Yelp, while building up their technologies in smaller markets.

So what kind of stuff do you find doing a search on Grayboxx? For the most part, results are similar to what you'd see on other local search sites. There are addresses, hours of operation, phone numbers and any related Web sites. You also get neighborhood recommendations on the side of every listing, which will tell you if the service has a buzz. What was sharply missing in my testing though, were user reviews of any sort. Grayboxx claims to pull in reviews from third-party sites (like the Yelps and Yahoo Locals of the world), although I couldn't find a single one in my two test cities. While there's space for them on each listing, you can't add your own two cents about the service directly.

I find more often than not that user reviews can be the most helpful part of a business listing when it comes to looking for a recommendation. While services like Yelp and Yahoo Local offer mostly subjective reviews--and widely about food, it's the little things like which food dishes are the best, or important information like times to avoid a place when it's too busy or too quiet. While I don't doubt the interesting new direction Grayboxx is moving towards, I think the user-generated quotient is critical and will remain king.

Don't let the Digg-like counters fool you, those numbers are automatically generated by Grayboxx, the local listing recommendation service.

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Zocdoc is a new service for finding local dentists and booking appointments for times that work with your schedule. It's aim is to replace the often aggravating process of trying to find a local dentist through the overwhelming, and often non-user-friendly directories provided by insurance companies.

Just plug in your city or ZIP code, and Zocdoc will pull up a list of local dentists, along with their daily appointment openings and insurance options. You can sort open appointment times by the type of service you're looking for--e.g., cleanings, Invisalign, or the hallowed root canal. If you find an appointment that sounds good, Zocdoc has an appointment request system that forwards your request to the selected dentist's office.

You can also check out a dentist's online profile, which includes important information like their specialties, education, languages spoken, and affiliations with professional organizations. Each dentist profile page includes a map and a list of user-submitted patient reviews. Think of it being like a background check before your date with the drill.

This is a great concept, although out of personal experience, I'm pretty happy sleuthing results on Yahoo Local and Yelp. The obvious missing piece here is an appointment scheduling system and a way to sort by insurance, which seems like something both services could add. Zocdoc launched this morning at the TechCrunch40 conference, and is currently limited to 2 percent of dentists in the Manhattan area with plans for expansion into other cities and the inclusion of medical listings for local doctors.

Live in New York? Need a dentist's appointment? Check out Zocdoc.

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For vacationers in the United States, time off is serious business. Most folks only get two weeks of playtime, and planning what to do and where to do it can be a serious pain. TripCart is a do-it-yourself trip-planning service that's a cross between Yelp and AAA's TripTik service. The site employs a mix of Google Maps, and local attraction ratings--user and editor generated--to let you browse and find interesting things to do. Instead of slurping in content from other services (similar to what Yahoo Local has done with Yelp), the reviews and ratings are site-specific.

The real killer application of TripCart is putting together your trip. Simply explore things you'd like to do on a list, or by browsing through them by genre on the map. To add them to your itinerary, just click the "add to trip" button. If you've logged in to the site, TripCart will keep track of your picks and let you edit and manage them in a separate section called "plan trip." Here, you can sort your picked items by item type or region, meaning that with one click you can figure out the best plan of attack for hitting each destination without zigzagging around town.

Best of all, there's a printable version that will take each of your entries in the order you chose and print them up with titles, addresses, and descriptions in both a summary and daily view. It's essentially a do-it-yourself guidebook.

Despite its dead simple concept, and great local results, it would be really nice to get some secondary recommendations about places from Yelp or Yahoo Local. There is something to be said about the wisdom of the masses, and it's quite clear of that when it comes to food recommendations. Secondly, the site is a little on the slow side, and I could see using it to add more than 40 or 50 destinations a little cumbersome. You're also limited to the United States, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, unless you're leaving the country. In the meantime, if you're looking for a well-designed and easy to use trip planner, TripCart is a really solid solution.

Find stuff to do for your vacation and add it to a trip with TripCart. The service also lets you manage and print out your itinerary for later.

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There's no doubt Yelp was going to add a local events and calendaring functionality to their popular user reviews service, and today they've done it with a new feature called Events. Coincidentally, last week brought about a refresh of Yahoo's Local service, which finally integrated Yahoo's own events service Upcoming.org.

Not surprisingly, Yelp Events is quite similar to Upcoming.org, with a landing page for each event, a comment board, and a list of yeses and maybes from community members to say whether they'll be attending. The main difference being the way user profiles matter. For Upcoming it's all about the events you've gone to or are going to, whereas Yelp's profiles center around your reviews and list of favorite places. That being said, Yelp has also integrated your track record of events into your user profiles, although the focus remains on reviews.

Another key difference is integration. Despite the refresh on Yahoo's part, Upcoming and Yahoo Local are still separate services. For instance, say you want to catch the Beastie Boys show at the Greek Theater tomorrow night in Berkeley. Upcoming can tell you about the venue, but first it'll have to spit you out to Yahoo Local. Yelp on the other hand, has their review ratings integrated so you can quickly tell if the venue is hot or not (sometimes literally) without making you feel like you're being jettisoned to a different Web service.

The one thing Upcoming still has is coverage. Yelp has only rolled out the events features to 10 major cities in the US including San Francisco, New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Austin, Chicago, Washington D.C., and San Diego. Don't be surprised if this makes its way to the rest of the Yelpified cities before the year's end.

Keep an eye on events in your city with Yelp's new events feature.

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