Google Schemer is a deliciously diabolical attack against Foursquare

Oh Google, your aptly named new product Schemer doesn’t have us fooled. We know you’re calling it a new way to discover things to do, but we see this for what it really is — an assault against Foursquare and the company’s hold over quality location-based content, city tips and to-dos.

Let’s start with the basics. Google Schemer launched earlier today as an invite-only Web application designed to help people explore new and familiar cities.… Continue Reading

Ness, the iPhone app that tells you where to eat, hooks up with Facebook

What’s for dessert? Turn to three month-old Ness for the answer, and its lovely-looking iPhone app will find you the best nearby spots, suited to your exact tastes. Today the application received its first update, and it now further personalizes and socializes the food discovery process.

“The launch of the product … was all about understanding what the person’s preferences are and making sure, as a company, that we provided high quality results and recommendations … Continue Reading

eBay targets couch potatoes with new iPad app feature

Online auction site eBay is launching a new feature for its mobile applications today to help boost purchases from customers while they’re on the couch watching TV.

The move is part of eBay’s new “Couch Commerce” strategy. Users that open up the company’s iPad app will see a new “watch with eBay” tab that lets them type in their zip code, cable provider and current channel. Based on your viewing experience, the app will then … Continue Reading

Andreessen-Horowitz gives $1.5M to unlaunched recommendation app Wikets

Wikets, a soon-to-be-released iPhone application that recommends places and products to friends, announced a $1.5 million seed round from Andreessen-Horowitz and Battery Ventures today. But will yet another recommendations product survive when reviews and opinions already litter the Internet?

I imagine these recommendation apps to be like little bodies treading water in the Internet ocean. Apps like Where exist in rafts, websites such as Yelp are the ships that float on their own, and companies … Continue Reading

Demo: TasteJive lets wine recommendations be one of the cool kids

TasteJive wants to make wine just a little bit easier to swallow. Today the company launched its wine recommendation engine to take the jargon out and make wine more contemporary.

Wine can be intimidating and often pushes people away just for the fear of looking stupid. (I know, it’s hard to believe anyone would feel insecure with a bunch of people slurping, swishing and spitting around them, but hey, this is the wine-snob norm.) TasteJive … Continue Reading

Foursquare 3.0 will recommend where to check in

Foursquare, the hot location-based check-in startup, today announced on its blog that it will be releasing Foursquare 3.0 later today for Android and iPhone. The new version comes with several feature updates, but probably the most notable is the much-rumored recommendation engine.

We hinted to the recommendation engine back in September when co-founder and chief executive Dennis Crowley announced the possibility in front of Picnic, an annual three-day festival for sharing concepts in Amsterdam. The new feature … Continue Reading

Filmaster looks to be "Foursquare for films"

Filmaster, a recommendation engine for movies and shows, announced today that it’s launching an application programming interface, or API, for developers looking to use the service’s data and algorithms in their own applications or websites.

Through the API, the company gives developers access to users’ movie reviews and movie-search data. Users can use the service to learn about the tastes of other users in their area. Similar to Twitter, the service lets you follow or … Continue Reading

Bundle lets money do the talking with its new Restaurant Recommender

There’s no shortage of restaurant-review websites on the Web, but New York City startup Bundle is tapping into an even more honest source of opinion — people’s wallets.

Bundle launched earlier this year as a site where users can compare their spending habits to people like them. Popular personal finance site Mint.com recently released a similar product, MintData, but that data comes from the site’s 4 million users. Bundle may not have anywhere near that … Continue Reading

Google launches local business-recommendation engine Hotpot

Google today announced on its blog the release of Hotpot, a recommendation engine for local businesses based on you and your friends’ ratings. Hotpot is an addition to the company’s Google’s Places initiative, a campaign to get local business owners to claim their venues, verify information and engage with customers.

Hotpot is a pretty simple concept, but when connected with a business directory of more than 50 million places, it can be a powerful consumer … Continue Reading

How Hunch's CEO just slapped a "For Sale" sign on his company

We haven’t heard much about Hunch, the once-buzzy recommendations site based in New York — and what we’ve heard hasn’t been good. So it was interesting to read CEO Chris Dixon’s response to an anonymous questioner who asked why Hunch was building a general recommendations platform instead of focusing on solving one specific problem.

Dixon (pictured here, left) wrote an answer that is instructive when read closely:

We’ve talked to probably a hundred large websites … Continue Reading

Facebook provides recommendations with new Page Browser tool

This morning, Facebook officially launched Page Browser, a new tool that seeks to help its users discover and “like” new pages on the site using data from one’s previous likes, and that of users in their immediate social network.

Facebook’s like pages, previously termed “fan pages”, comprise of pages on the site representing artists, movies, and brands — some officially managed, some not. Over time, they’ve become a popular way of expressing interest and showing … Continue Reading

DEMO: iPad app Picksie will help you finally decide where to go for dinner

Picksie is one of 70 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2010 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.
iPad users now have another tool to settle the age-old question: “what are we doing tonight?”

With its launch today at the DEMO conference, Picksie will be the most recent to enter into a growing … Continue Reading

Belgacom invests $2 million in video recommendation service Jinni

Belgacom, which has 870,000 digital TV customers in Belgium, will invest $2 million EU in video recommendation service Jinni as part of a strategic partnership.

We previously covered Jinni when the company was named as one of Google’s partners for Google TV. Jinni claims to already have two tier-one cable operators in the U.S. as customers (the company cannot yet name them) but Belgacom is the company’s first European customer. Belgacom wants to make its … Continue Reading

Why the Facebook-Amazon.com integration is bigger than you think

Facebook and Amazon.com partnered Tuesday in what could be one of the social network’s most important integrations yet. Amazon.com now offers a personalized page, where consumers can see product recommendations influenced by friends and their own tastes. They get notifications on when friend’s birthdays are coming up and suggestions on what to buy for them.

It’s a big deal for a number of reasons.

A deep Amazon.com-Facebook partnership could help corner Google in the e-commerce … Continue Reading