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I’m indecisive when it comes to picking restaurants to eat at. Annoyingly so, I’ve been told. I simply don’t care the majority of the time; I’ll eat anything. Urbanspoon’s new native iPhone application may be the perfect tool for me.

The app is extremely simple. You open it, it detects your location then you shake your iPhone. This causes a series of sliders to spin around like a slot machine until they land with a recommendation on where to go. You don’t like the pick? Simply shake it again. (Watch the video demo at the bottom of the post.)

While this may seem silly, the underlying idea is one that I’ve been harping on a lot lately: the rise of location on mobile devices. Utilizing the new iPhone 3G’s GPS chip and Wi-Fi/Cell tower triangulation, Urbanspoon’s app knows exactly where you are without any input required from you.

When I said that I simply don’t care where I eat, I meant that I don’t care where I eat as long as it’s close by. Bingo.

It’s like a Magic 8 Ball, but for food recommendations and on a much more technologically advanced device.

The idea behind the Urbanspoon app was to create “something fun and toy-like — a practical app that felt like a game,” found Ethan Lowry told us. It’s a fun way to utilize the restaurant reviews from local newspapers, bloggers and users that the site has been collecting.

Urbanspoon currently operates in 41 cities across the country. The site sees close to a million monthly unique visitors according to Lowry.

The Urbanspoon iPhone application will be available when the App Store launches on July 11. It will be a free download.

Just as locality is going to be important for services such as the news, it’s going to be important for business such as local restaurants as well. Yelp and other competitors know this as well. The iPhone 3G could soon be the weapon they all battle with.

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There’s smoke, there’s fire, and then there’s a volcano the size of Olympus Mons on Mars erupting and turning the ground into an ocean of burning lava. Such is current state of speculation surrounding the 3G iPhone.

There’s really no point in beating around the bush at this point. The new iPhone is coming on Monday. You know it. I know it. We all know it. If Apple were not to announce it at this point, it would be perhaps the largest letdown in the history of the company. That simply won’t happen.

If you still have any doubts, look no further than some of the rumored 3rd party announcements that are beginning to trickle out as we approach the WWDC. What do a lot of them share in common? They are location-centric. While the current iPhone has location recognition capabilities for its Google Maps application, it is GPS technology that will be needed to be the lifeblood for these apps. The current iPhone does not have GPS. The new one almost certainly will.

We’ve already written about Whrrl, a location-based social network that was the first application to be accepted by Kleiner Perkins’ for the $100 million iFund. Is there really any question that this was built to use GPS?

Yelp is also apparently working on a native iPhone application that will be location-driven, according to CNET. This could be a game-changing app because it will utilize Yelp’s already expansive list of local establishment ratings and reviews and serve them to you automatically based on where you are. The application will be able to do this thanks to GPS.

There will be others as well. Brightkite, Loopt, Plazes, FireEagle — all of these are likely to be important, if not major, players as location technologies become more mainstream. Given the iPhone’s elegant user interface and great usability, it is likely to be the device that will lead the way. It just needs that GPS chip. And it will get it.

Twitter is the current leader in the micro-blogging/micro-messaging sphere, but if it doesn’t act soon to offer some sort of location capabilities, it will get left in the dust. Is anyone going to want to type out their location, when your phone can send it automatically for you? This could be something to watch for in the coming months as Twitter will likely be bogged down trying to fix its architectural problems.

The GPS-enabled iPhone is coming — is your application ready?

For more on location technologies, check out the post by Eric Karr, the vice president of location technologies at Loopt, on TechCrunch.

Social networks built around location are a hot item, and getting hotter.

It’s one thing to have a group of contacts which you can update with words from a mobile device (think the micro-messaging service Twitter). It’s another to be able to quickly update your exact location on a map and have others see it. Add to that the ability to review places (think: Yelp) as well as tag places you would like to go, and you have a general idea of Whrrl, a location-based social network.

Several other services including BrightKite and Yahoo’s FireEagle, are exploring similar usage of location for networks, but with this new round of funding, Whrrl gets an important ally: T-Mobile. Deutsche Telekom’s venture capital arm, T-Mobile Venture Fund led this latest Series B round.

T-Mobile’s support validates the service, said Jeff Holden, chief executive and co-founder of Pelago, Whrrl’s parent. T-Mobile and Indian venture fund Reliance Technology Ventures (RTVL), which also participated in the round, will be important in helping the service expand globally, Holden said.

This location-based network arena will only get hotter as newer technologies and newer phones come into the market. While Google’s Android is still a little ways off, Apple’s 3G iPhone is expected to be just around the corner, and is expected to add GPS technology. Whrrl has already spoken on its blog about its excitement about building a native application for the device with the software development kit (SDK).

Pelago was the first company in venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers‘ portfolio to join Kleiner Perkins’ iFund, the $100 million fund which the firm set up to spur iPhone application development. Kleiner Perkins participated in both Pelago’s Series A round as well as this latest round. Other return investors include Trilogy Equity Partners and Bezos Expeditions. DAG Ventures is a new investor.

Loopt is yet another company doing something similar to whrrl, using GPS to update your friends’ location on a map. Loopt is backed by Kleiner rival, Sequoia.

As more and more phones add GPS capabilities, the ability to update Whrrl will get easier and easier. In fact, a user could use the service to send out updates of their location to friends without having to touch the device.

The Seattle, WA-based Pelago previously raised $7.4 million in 2006. We wrote about Whrrl in November.

1995 might as well be the dawn of civilization in terms of the Internet as we know it today. Yet that is how long Angie’s List, a source for local service ratings, has been around. Today, the company announces a new round of funding to keep its site going strong well into the future.

The $35 million investment comes from Battery Ventures, which will also take a minority stake in the company with the deal.

Angie’s List has over 600,000 members across 124 cities in the United States. This new investment will be used to expand into new markets in the U.S. as well as into new rating/review categories — such as the recently launched medical reviews.

Another priority will be expanding into select international markets. There is competition overseas, but by utilizing its 10-plus years of experience in the business, Angie’s List is confident it will work very effectively in other countries as well, Battery Ventures’ general partner Roger Lee tells us.

$35 million is a lot of money but the company believes its model is built to scale larger both in this country and aboard. Access to providers, quality and reliability are all important factors which Angie’s List currently has working in its favor.

One competitor in this country is Bestcontractors.com, which also allows users to find trust-worthy professionals by way of customer reviews, but that services currently operates in far fewer markets. Yelp, also offers customer reviews, but is broadly focused making it more difficult to find pertinent service recommendations (our coverage).

A newer entry in the arena is GenieTown, which has a special focus on the Bay Area (our coverage).

Local review site Yelp has raised $15 million from DAG Ventures. The rumor first popped up on Epicenter, last Friday, as a $30 million round at a $200 million valuation, but that valuation hasn’t been confirmed by the company.

This round comes as San Francisco-based Yelp continues to grow. The company launched its site in early 2005, and hit the one million review mark in May last year. It’s accelerating: Since May, it has gained another 1.3 million reviews. Traffic is correspondingly picking up. It had 8.3 million unique visitors in the past 30 days, it claims.

The company started in San Francisco and in its early days spread through word-of-mouth, but it has also featured high in search results when you look for restaurants on Google. It has opened up in other cities, and once a city gets enough active users Yelp will hire a city community manager, who does things like put on events for local Yelpers, as they’re called.

In-person events have been a part of the company’s strategy since it launched, but it doesn’t track how significant these efforts have been in generating traffic.

The company promotes a sense of competition among reviewers, for example to be the first to review a restaurant. If you’re first, you might get featured on the site and in its email newsletter to users.

The funding will be used for more sales team hires, a new office in New York, and presumably more community managers. The company faces competition from InsiderPages, which was bought by local search engine CitySearch a year ago (our coverage), along with other startups, and local information efforts by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Yelp seems to have established itself as the place for reviews: many competitors I’ve seen have Yelp reviews somehow integrated into their own interfaces.

The company previously raised money from Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital and angel investor Max Levchin, for a total of $31 million to date.

Sample review screenshot:

Updated with full list of names of angel investors

How do you build the perfect local community Web site — with news, events, comments and more?

If you manage to, it will be a grand slam. It becomes the talk of the town, people spend more time going there, and local advertisers spend money there.

A wave of companies have tried, but failed. But Outside.in, a new Brooklyn, NY start-up is looking very good — as good, if not better than any we’ve seen so far. Its visual presentation is nice and simple (see screenshot at bottom). It uses AJAX and other technologies to improve upon efforts preceding it.

Here’s the background: Newspapers have largely dropped the ball. A dozen or so Internet companies have tried to adapt the community concept online, but none have nailed it. There’s Yelp, which specializes in reviews of bars and restaurants. There’s Judysbook, which began with a broader community feel, but has since moved toward shopping. There’s Insiderpages, which is struggling, and focused on business listings. Smalltown focuses on local business, too. Topix gives you community news. Backfence gets closer, as does ePodunk to coverage of wider community events — but their execution and user interfaces have remained unimpressive. Craigslist provides a local marketplace, but stops there.

Outside.in takes both existing content (from local bloggers, city governments, movie listings) and user generated content, and packages them into local sites.

For each town, Outside.in lets you see stories, comments, places and “neighbors,” or registered users. It has one useful, powerful feature we haven’t seen before: You can switch the focus of your region easily — using a map feature at the top left of your region. This lets you zoom in or out to include more or less surrounding regions or cities — and the information, news, events and comments all adjust in real time.

So you can limit a search for crime to Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Then you can search for Italian restaurants across the entire city. Or you can look for poetry readings in Park Slope and surrounding neighborhoods. All by just scrolling within a map.

There’s a lot to look at here. Outside.in provides a URL for each city (it adds a +1 to the URL if you zoom out and see a mile of surrounding area, etc), but also for each place. For example, there’s an entry for the Whole Foods in Brooklyn, which is under development, and creating considerable community debate. People can go to the URL and see the latest stories by local bloggers, and can submit their own comments.

In this way, Outside.in wants to be a Wikipedia for local places. How does it monitor the comments and entries? Well, like Wikipedia, it has the crowd controllers. Of its eight full-time employees, three are chaperoning the site, and 12 more freelancers are helping out.

It is early days, and it is a little buggy. For example, in Palo Alto, Calif., some “top places” are actually based in places like Mountain View (in part, because Outside.in is still figuring out how to deal with regions like the Bay Area where cities merge into each other, and because it wants to show places with buzz within ten miles from you).

Founder Steven Johnson gave us a demo today. He was the co-founder of the online magazine FEED and community site, Plastic.com.

Hollywood producer Andy Karsch, and John Seely Brown seed-funded the company with $200,000. Yesterday, the company announced it raised $900,000 more from Union Square Ventures, Milestone, Village Ventures and individuals Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder), Esther Dyson, George Crowley, John Borthwick and Richard Smith.

This will be fun to watch. We’ve been waiting for a decent site to come along. While Outside.in has a long way to go, it is looking very smart.