Yelp Official Blog

Yelp for Android Goes European

Passport? Check.
Fluent in destination language? You know it.
Connections with locals in the know? Heck yes.

 

Yelp for Android is locked, loaded and localized -- and starting today, available to our friends in Europe! Along with our wildly popular Yelp for iPhone application, now yelpers in France, Germany, Austria and The Netherlands can leverage Yelp for Android in their native language (French, German or Dutch) to discover businesses around them.

 


Features include leveraging Yelp’s over 17 million reviews to search for nearby businesses on the go, the ability to check-into a business and unlock a Yelp Check-in Offer to save some cash, augment your reality with “Monocle”, maps, phone calls, directions and more!

Watch the below video to check out how you can use Yelp for Android wherever you might be.

Jeremy Stoppelman Joins President Obama at Facebook Town Hall

Our CEO and co-founder, Jeremy Stoppelman, was interviewed at Facebook headquarters yesterday during a Town Hall they hosted with President Barack Obama.

In addition to the President of the United States, Jeremy was in other good company, with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Premal Shah of Kiva among other attendees -- as well as MC Hammer!

Watch Jeremy talk about the important impact social media has had on small businesses, especially as we continue to pull out of the recession. And don’t miss his #1 San Francisco restaurant tip for President Obama!

Who's the #1 Yelp Reviewed Shaver in Scranton?

Yelp was founded in 2004, in part, because the Internet hadn’t done a great job of answering the question, “How do you find a great doctor in San Francisco?”

Today, you can find that doctor, plus a lot more.

 

Joking aside, Will Ferrell’s line in The Office isn’t too far off: Since January 2011 to March 2011, 2.5 million reviews -- full reviews (not just one-click ratings) -- were created on Yelp.

Now we just need to get Dwight to claim the business owner's account for Schrute Farms!

Did Someone Ask for Menus with Their Yelp Reviews?

We always have exciting things going on at Yelp: from Hackathons to iPhone updates and Yelp Deals, our team is hard at work to bring you the best experience possible when looking for great businesses in your hood.

While we regularly crank on updates and improvements, many behind the scenes, we’re always stoked when we’re able to bring users and business owners features that they’ve specifically asked for -- and today is no exception: the ability to add menu URLs to Yelp business pages!

 

The “Menu” option will be located directly under the business’s website URL on their Yelp listing. How’d the menu get there? Magic! Well, no, not really. We’ve actually created an algorithm to crawl restaurant websites to automatically identify menu URLs (ie: http://www.taureaunyc.com/menu.html) Today you’ll see the “Menu” option in major cities including New York, San Francisco, Washington DC, Los Angeles and Chicago, but don’t fret, we’ll be adding even more cities in the coming weeks!

Want to lend a hand? You’re a yelper, so of course you do! Users can add links to menus when they edit business information, or business owners can add them through their Yelp for Business Owners page. It’s important to note that all URLs -- whether added by users, business owners or automatically -- are vetted by our user ops team before they appear on the site (need to make sure no tom foolery involving McDonald’s menus and Gary Danko is going on).

While Menu links will just appear on the site for now, keep an eye out for them on our mobile apps in future updates -- as well as for other tricks and tips from Team Yelp!

Yelp's 4th Bi-Annual Hackathon

Our bi-annual Hackathon has become a much anticipated tradition at Yelp HQ. So much so, we see employees in divisions outside of just engineering, product and systems participate in creating and building projects that fall under our Useful, Funny, Cool mantra.

It’s not just the hacking that’s become tradition. In fact, we’ve injected all our Yelp Hackathons with a little something extra, such as: Mimosas (we did build the Kegmate, after all), special guest speakers (Max Levchin!), Yelp Hackpacks, bouncy castles (to stretch ones legs), pinatas (stuffed with Nerf darts), sleepovers, and ice cream sundaes.

Wait a minute.

This is starting to sound like a 7 year old’s birthday party. Well, minus the mimosas and Max. We promise we did build a bunch of totally rad projects — both for the internal team at Yelp, as well as for the 50 million yelpers and business owners far and wide!

Over 20 projects were created during the Hackathon and demoed at the awards ceremony, including the Yelp Gauntlet, Mobile Business Owner App and the Yelp Looking Glass — all of which you can check out in this video here!

For past Yelp Hackathons, take a look here, here and here! Like what you see? Join the Yelp team!

Going NATIONAL with Yelp Deals

Today we break the Yelp mold and pull back from offering city-specific Yelp Deals to bring you our first national deal!* We’re pretty excited to share this with you for two reasons. First, this is an innovative and bold new channel that businesses can leverage to deepen engagement with highly targeted consumers – consumers who will in turn, write reviews of their real first hand experiences. 

More importantly, we’re keepin’ it YELPY for our users. Our ability to tap into and target local consumers by interest (in this case puppy lovers), anywhere across the US, means that we are able to provide our users with the most compelling and relevant deals from businesses that are highly rated on Yelp. Now that’s a win-win if we ever smelled one.

For our first national Yelp Deal we searched high and low to find a deal YELPY enough. Trust us, it wasn’t easy. We are thrilled to present you with an amazing bargain from Forever Young - the five-star puppy rental service. Here’s a screen shot, click on it if you want to get in on the puppy love.

Rent a New Puppy Every Month From Forever Young

 *April Fools Day!