Medallions and Community Buttons

Medallions (or category) search has now been moved into the map area. This makes it easier to search and navigate by keeping everything in the map.


Also the medallions are now clearly labeled below and the on/off functionality is easily recognizable. Try them out yourself. We have...

• Hotspots (What's new in the city - restaurants, bars, shops)
• Nightlife (bars, clubs, lounges)
• Restaurants (search by cuisine and then filter by attributes)
• Shopping (lots and lots of shopping in NYC)
• Hotels (search by star rating)
• Recreation (salons, spas, theaters, gyms, etc)

Also, on the right side of the map, you will see community buttons as shown below.

Use these 3 buttons to discover places through your friends and the UpNext community.

- Friends: Shows reviews, favorites and places marked by your friends

- Community: Shows the latest reviews, top favorites and popular places from the UpNext community based on the area of the map.

- My Profile: Shows all the places you have marked. Your own personally annotated guide to the city.


Vik was the lead on getting these medallions done while Robin was the creative force on the sleek look and design. Gotta give credit where credit is due. Hope you enjoy and find them useful.

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Yelp Reviews

There is nothing better than having a passionate user base. We love our UpNext community members and all the feedback they give us.

So when given the opportunity to leverage another great group of users, we jumped at the chance.

The Yelp API allows us to bring more content into UpNext, helping you better understand and evaluate businesses in NYC.

Once a venue is selected. Click on "More Info" in the venue window to open the expanded sidebar. Here you will see up to 3 reviews from Yelp related to that business.


The screenshot above is a great example of how UpNext combined with Yelp content can be a very useful tool. Mr. Jones is a Japanese restaurant that opened this month. You can tell it is a new restaurant by the glowing red dot hovering over the location (UpNext Hotspots). When you click on "More Info", 2 Yelp reviews appear.

For a place that has been open less than a month, these Yelp reviews provide you with some immediate feedback on the location. Pretty impressive stuff from the Yelp community.

So take a look around when exploring New York City. Let us know how you like the Yelp integration and any feedback you might have.

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UpNext 2.0 or as we call it UpNext (the way better version)

So the team has been working overtime on this new version of UpNext. Honestly, I am blown away by the improvements and want to share them with everyone.

Even before you read this post, go to the new site (www.upnext.com) and check it out.

Here is a list of the new stuff we want to point out. (We will be writing expanded follow up posts on some of these features.)

1) Usability

Load time - UpNext now loads as fast as any other webpage. This required quite of feat of engineering by Raj, so please direct all your praise to him.
(Note: The first load will take slightly longer as we do need to build the base of the city initially. But subsequent visits will be fast.)

Speed and Stability - The overall UpNext experience is now faster and more stable. Try it out, you will notice the difference immediately. Exploring the city is now, an even better experience.


2) Features

Yelp Reviews - We are now utilizing the Yelp API to bring in more content for our users. When you click on the "More Info" button, you will see 3 Yelp reviews in addition to any editorial and user reviews that were there previously.

Permalinks - In the top right corner of the map, there is a icon labeled "Map Permalink". This feature allows you to take a snapshot of any part of the map and share it in an email, blog, Facebook, where ever you want.

Medallion - We have taken the category community medallions and brought them into the maps. (See the glowing buttons on the top and right of the map area?)
This allows to you to focus your interaction within the map and to easily find anything (from restaurants and nightlife to recommendations from other users and friends.)


3) Overall Look and Feel

We have improved the look and feel of the city. Fly around midtown and you will see a noticeable difference in how the city looks. There are more landmarks and better textures for all buildings.

Also, zoom down to the street level. Play around down there and run around the city. (More is coming for this feature so keep an eye out.)


There is a lot more in this new version than we listed above but those are just the highlights. Go check out the new site. Tell your friends about it. And tell us what you think, we would love to hear from you.

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UpNext featured in Forbes.com

The last couple weeks have been pretty good for us in terms of press. We did an interview with Maureen Farrell at Forbes.com. Check out it out to see some new stuff that we are working on.

UpNext on Forbes

(Sorry, no embed option again)

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UpNext on CW11 Morning News

It has been a while since our last post. We have been in a black hole of sorts getting the new and improved UpNext ready. It should be coming soon so keep an eye out.

In the meantime, enjoy this segment that aired on the CW11 morning news a couple days ago.

Raj and Vik both did an awesome job and are naturals in front of the camera.

UpNext on CW11

(Sorry no embed option on this video.)

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Hyperlocal: The ad side of the equation

I recently read a post on Peter Krasilovsky's blog, The Local Onliner, about Citysquares and the progress they have made. Here are some of the numbers Peter mentions...

Boston-based CitySquares, which just celebrated its second anniversary, is getting about 70,000 unique visitors per month and now has a base of 700 advertisers, averaging $1,200 per year, reports CEO Ben Saren. He believes they have even more potential via upsells such as video, sponsored/display ads, etc.

Those are some impressive numbers for the team over at Citysquares. I have met Ben and Bob, the founders, many times at local conferences and other tech related events. They are great guys who are passionate about building a fantastic product. These guys really get how to connect and work with local businesses and I think the results to date speak for themselves.

Citysquares is becoming another example of how hyperlocal can work by focusing on one area and becoming the experts there. But most site want to grow, expand and become national players. Thus Citysquares is now expanding outside of the Boston area into other Northeast cities. So the question becomes, how do you scale this advertising model to each region?

Is it simply a matter of throwing more sales people into the pot? More sales people is a solution, but does not make for a very scalable proposition. And this is the issue that most local sites face when trying to expand. There is very little, if any, overlap in your customer base and relationships must be build again from the ground up.

(While some of you might think this is a perfectly fine sales model, it should be understood that on the web it is expected that you have an self serving algorithmic based sales robot that requires no salary and can handle an infinite amount of customers while still converting an infinite amount of new customers. This way your revenues achieve hockey stick like growth while your costs remain flat.)

So while the promise of hyperlocal tantalizes, the economics of it seem to lag. But having attended many local conferences this past year, I can tell you that there are many smart people and companies working on new solutions. And having chatted with them in the past, I know Ben and Bob have some innovative and interesting ideas on hyperlocal and how to make it work.

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Hyperlocal: How can it work?

The recent news of the Washington Post's struggles to establish their local property LoudonExtra.com has sparked some conversation around hyperlocal and how to make it work?

Fred Wilson, a NYC venture capitalist, has written many times on hyperlocal and has made an investment in Outside.in which focuses on created newspapers for every zip code. He recently wrote a post entitled, "Hyperlocal Has To Be Peer Produced".

I have been interested in "hyperlocal" for years and have blogged about this topic quite a bit. From day one, I've been convinced that hyperlocal must be "peer produced". That means we together will document what is going on in our streets, our schools, our churches, our parks, and our communities. No "newsroom centric" model is going to work. That's how I see it.

I completely agree that peer produced content is the way to go for hyperlocal sites. Yet, there must still be an editorial voice or curator in the background to help filter and frame the stories that emerge from a neighborhood. The noise to signal ratio on peer produced content can become overwhelming without some filters. Individuals can produce great peer produced content but once aggregated that great content can become noise.

Local aggregators are becoming more and more popular. Local news, local events, local promotions, local anything. You crawl the web for it, you aggregate it, and you plot it on a map and there is your new hyperlocal site. But the reality is that the majority of users are not looking for all the deals in their area or all the events in their area. They want a direction or voice behind the information.

This is why email newsletters are successful. The Daily Candy's and Urban Daddy's of the world establish a voice and provide relevant local content that has been pruned and plucked for the user.

The Washington Post's struggles show why the peer produced content can not be ignored. But this peer produced content needs to be managed and filtered. In a sense, we are all reporters with an editorial staff behind us.

(Note: We did not touch upon scalability and monetization issues, two of the other pillars of hyperlocal. Perhaps in another post we will try to tackle those issues.)

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