Urbanspoon: Restaurant Reviews Coming To A City Near You

Urbanspoon is a small Seattle startup that wants to help you find the perfect restaurant. Their goal: compete head on with Yelp and other user review sites, specifically around restaurants.

But they are approaching the market in a different way than Yelp and others. Instead of talking users into coming to their site and writing reviews, they’re taking a decentralized approach and aggregating available reviews from trusted sources around the web - local newspapers, citysearch, etc. The approach is very similar to what Rotten Tomatoes has done successfully with movies.

Users can vote on each restaurant in the system and can also leave comments - effectively their own reviews. And anyone that wants a review they’ve written on a blog or elsewhere to be included can do so by adding a bit of code to the post.

So far, so good. They’re claiming 1.5 million monthly page views on 500,000 unique visitors. The company covers fourteen U.S. cities currently, with fifteen more on the way. And they’ve done all of this with a three man team and no funding. All three founders, Ethan Lowry, Adam Doppelt and Patrick O’Donnell, are ex-Jobster employees.

Mobile Video Company Vantrix Takes $12 Million Series B

Online platform delivery specialists Vantrix Corporation have secured $12 million in Series B financing, in a round led by JK&B Capital. Existing investors SummerHill Venture Partners, Entrepia Ventures, BDC Venture Capital, and Innovacom have also participated. Ali Shadman from JK&B Capital joins the Vantrix board as part of the deal.

Vantrix will use the proceeds from the round to expand the company’s operations globally and to invest in infrastructure and R&D to support the company’s growing customer base.

Vantrix offers a mobile focused rich media delivery platform; or in laymen’s terms it provides delivery tools that allow video to be easily viewed on cellphones. Manish Jha, CEO of Vantrix said that of the Vantrix platform: “Delivering rich media on mobile phones should not be hindered by obstacles such as the fragmentation of devices, screen sizes, codec types, content formats, media player characteristics and network incompatibility issues. Vantrix helps content providers and carriers worldwide overcome these barriers to deliver ubiquitous and compelling new mobile services to consumers.”

More Competition For IPTV: HP Launching Next.TV

Hewlett Packard has announced a deal to ship a P2P IPTV system with their notbooks (notably the Presario and Pavillion models) beginning in late September. It will also be available as a system update for exiting HP Vista computers. The system is called Next.tv and powered by Dave Networks, a white label IPTV provider. For the launch, Next.tv will feature content from CBS, Freemantle, and Endemol. Their sneak preview also includes MGM, eye.tv, Lazy.tv, and Reality.tv as well. Other partnerships, filling a total of 50 channels, will be announced throughout September.

Next.TV has plans for a desktop version for non HP users as well.

Rex Wong, the former CEO of Applied Semantics (later Google Adsense), is the CEO of Dave Networks. Wong previously expressed a desire to do for video what AdSense did for text. Last April, Rex Wong said, “We will be using the same technology used by Homeland Security to monitor [telephone] chatter. Audio keywording will allow us to contextually figure out where to sell ads and to place more than just pre- and post-roll ads.” He planed to launch the contextual video advertising service on their YouTube competitor, Dave.TV.

While Next.tv’s distribution deal through HP gives them a good head start, they’re going up an increasingly crowded marketplace. Joost, Babelgum, Veoh, British Telecom, Zattoo, and Vuze are amongst the competition. Scoring the best content deals will likely determine who makes IPTV work.

nexttvsmall.png

Email Attachments Are So Uncool

Online office suite Zoho released another product tonight, called Zoho Viewer. It is similar to Scribd (and the upcoming Docstoc) - upload an office or PDF document for easy viewing on Zoho’s website or embedded into other web pages.

Zoho Viewer is different than Scribd, though. With Scribd, documents are public by default (there is a private option). Zoho isn’t looking to create a community around documents like Scribd does. All documents are private and you must know the URL to view them. They are not listed in any directory or searcheable. So it is useful primarily to quickly upload email attachments and other documents you want to share with a few people but not the whole world. Viewers can also quickly download the document in its original format.

See the video below for an overview of Zoho Viewer. As an aside, I really like Viddler, which Zoho used to host the video. The quality is a lot better than YouTube and the player is very well done.