Web 2 Voice

Over on the IfByPhone blog, I posted a note on a mashup one of our guys did with Yelp.  With about 30 minutes of effort, and 20 lines of code, we opened up the entirety of the Yelp review database to anyone with a phone.

What the mashup does is ask you for the phone number of the business you’re looking for information on, and you get the total number of reviews for that business and the average review.  We’re working on phase 2 as we speak.

This is a little mashup that took almost no time, and yet has a good amount of utility (and we have ideas on on more features that will add more value to this service).  I published the mashup mainly to prove a point.  This simple and inexpensive mashup really provides great value to Yelp.  We’re opening up their database so that now it can be used be people with no access to a computer.

The value of a service like Yelp is not so much in the data.  It’s in the use of the data.  It’s great that they have a huge number of reviews on their site.  But it’s not until someone actually sees that data that it becomes useful.  By adding voice access to your database\applicaiton\network you can dramatically increase the usage of that data, and by definition the value of the service you are providing.

I encourage you to check out my post on IfByPhone’s blog.  But if you want to try out the mashup, just call 866.596.8333 and type in the number of the business you want reviewed (use 312.266.1616 for the place with the best ribs in Chicago).

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.