Qype - Live and tell

We’re a little foggy-headed in the Qype office this morning thanks to the selection of rather tasty New World wines we sampled at the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy event last night.

In case you missed our earlier blog post, this was the latest of our ‘Big Adventure’ outings, where we invite a few Qypers along to indulge in something a bit special (last month was chocolate tasting, and we’re seriously considering sushi making for June, but if you have any better ideas let us know here).

Yesterday evening a small group of us (Guernican, Timinator, Annie Mole, Tiki Chris and Shiny Gemma, plus myself and Andrew) went to the rather posh 19th-century venue, Il Bottaccio on Grosvenor Place to take part in a showcase of half-a-dozen wine producers.

We kicked off in Western Australia (complete with surfboards and imported sand!) at the Cape Mentelle display and got our palates in gear with their Sauvignon Blanc, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Chiraz.

As the vino flowed and the debates about ‘pepperyness’ and ‘drinkability’ began, we traveled to California courtesy of Newton whose ‘unfiltered selection’ didn’t really do it for us (although their nut snacks went down a storm!), before soldiering bravely back to Oz and Green Point’s top notch rosé (dangerously drinkable stuff!). The watermelon foams they were supplying were a big hit too.

Next up was Argentina and Terrazas de los Andes. These guys definitely had the best ‘gimmick’ of the event: tiny plastic drawers each containing a mini-morsel of food to accompany their three wines. So we all got to tuck into some mini crème brûlée (for the Chardonnay), a minute but delicious serving of lamb (for the Malbec, which we all really liked), and a morsel of beef (for the Cab Sav).

Finally, with everyone just about able to tackle the staircase, we went downstairs to try out the selection on offer at Cheval des Andes, a South American/French joint production whose Malbec-Cabernet Sauvignon blend got nods of approval all round.

And then it was down to the pub for a few well-earned beers!

Here’s a few snaps that Tiki Chris took of the event (there’s a few more on the Qype UK Flickr stream), and if you’d like to get involved in the next Qype Big adventure then keep an eye out right here on the blog and make sure you join in the conversation in this thread.

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

We said we’d try and do one every month, and after April’s fantastic knees-up the pressure is on to do it all again.

So this time we’ve booked ourselves a cool little space above the Theodore Bullfrog pub, right next to Charing Cross station that will hopefully be pretty handy for everyone to get to and from. Festivities begin at 7pm and just like last time there’ll be a few free drinks available and a bit of grub to graze on too.

(And, no, we have no idea where the pub’s name comes from, answers on a postcard please.)

We know we’re being very London-centric right now, and we can only offer our apologies to everyone outside the M25. Sufice to say, we are coming your way very soon, and if you know of (or run!) a fantastic venue somewhere that you’d be happy for us to invite a bunch of discerning reviewer types along to then do get in touch.

See you all on the 29th!

Just a quick post to let you know that we just introduced the comments functionality on pictures.

That means every picture on the site is open for debate and appraisal..and that includes profile pics.

So if something (or someone) on Qype catches your eye, then you know what to do!

We admit it, we’re all in love with the iPhone here in the Qype office.

Its shininess, its touchscreeniness, and its general cleverness has completely won us over. So it’s no surprise that we’d want to build a special iPhone-friendly version of everyone’s favourite review site that takes full advantage of all that shiny touchscreeny cleverness.

So may we present to you iQype, a completely browsable, searchable version of Qype built specifically for the iPhone.

Browse by city then category to find the top rated places in any given area, or find reviews for a specific business by doing a quick search.

Everything’s there: star ratings, full reviews, user profiles… and it’s all built around the native iPhone user interface so there’s no fiddly zooming and scrolling.

Next time you’re on the move have a play around with iQype and then let us know what you think. We’re always working on introducing better, cleverer ways of making Qype more accessible and useful, so any ideas you have are very welcome.

Thank you to everyone who came to the first ever Qype UK party last night at the Coach and Horses in Soho. Judging by the decidedly hungover emails we’ve had today it seems that everyone had a great time.

We personally enjoyed the appearance of the world’s largest Chupa Chup (above), the mini fish and chips, and the fact that Tube blogger Annie Mole fell asleep on the way home and ended up in Hounslow.

We should say a huge thank you to Coach and Horses landlord Alistair and the best barmaids in the whole of London: Jo and Denise.

All the photos from last night can be found on this page and don’t forget to review the Coach and Horses in the next week to stand a chance of winning £50 behind the bar plus a meal for four.

See you all at the next party!

Are users of some social networks fed up of being ‘bitten’, ‘poked’ and having sheep thrown at them? That’s the question put forward by the Beeb’s tech programme BBC Click this week.

According to the programme a new breed of social networks are closing in on the likes of Facebook and MySpace, offering something more than “just a glorified friend finder”.

The BBC very nicely chose to include Qype in their group of ’socially useful sites’ and yours truly even makes a brief appearance in the programme to explain a little bit about how Qype works.

The feature looks at the rise of practical, people-powered sites as well as asking the usual questions about the possible abuse of user-generated content (owners hyping up their businesses for example), and the future of data portability across different networks.

You can watch the whole programme on this page (or just read the text version if you prefer). The story also made the front age of Digg so there’s a conversation going on on that site too.

As always, let us know what you think in the comments.

Next month Qype.co.uk is breaking out of the interweb and invading the real world.

To say thanks to our dedicated band of UK Qypers we’re inviting you all to one of our favourite London boozers for the night.

There’ll be free drinks, some awesome prizes, dancing until dawn (or at least closing time), and the opportunity to amass enough blackmail material on the Qype team to last the rest of their natural born lives!

And if you’re good we may even let you near the buffet.

THE VENUE: The brilliant Coach and Horses pub just off Charing Cross Road (click the link for all the details).

THE DATE: Thursday April 3.

THE TIME: 7pm until late.

Looking forward to seeing you all there!

You might have noticed over the past few days that it’s now possible to embed images in your reviews.

Previously you could only upload your pics to a place’s gallery, but now you can show off your best shots within your review just by placing the url of the image file between two exclamation points, like this:

!http://farm1.static.flickr.com/126/329059538_946fa95ccf_m.jpg!

The photo will appear in the body of your review, like this (you can see this review on the site here):

And it’s not just pictures you can add. If you feel like really pimping your review then you can put certain words in bold by surrounding them in asterisks (*like this*), put words in italics using underscores (_like this_), and link to other pages simply by posting the url (www.qype.com for example).

Happy formatting!

Here at Qype HQ we’re big believers in that old saying ‘a picture paints a thousand words’, if only because taking photos of a cool place saves a lot of wear and tear on our typing fingers.

And even if your prose is of Shakespearean quality just adding of a hastily taken, slightly blurry image taken on your phone to your review can really help communicate the awesomeness of a burger or some cheesy interior decor to your fellow Qypers.

And because we think Qype is a prettier place when it has more photos we thought we’d reward all those shutterbugs out there by giving away a sweet digital camera.

Here’s the deal: On Friday April 11th we’ll give away a 7 megapixel Fujifilm FinePix S5700 to someone who’s uploaded at least one image to Qype between now and then.

That means every time you upload an image in the next month (whether it’s a photo of a place or even a profile pic of your lovely smiling face) then you’ll increase your chance of winning the camera.

So what are you waiting for? Get snapping and cross your fingers (not both at the same time though, obviously).

Just because we introduced Qype version 3.0 a few weeks ago that doesn’t mean we’ve been sat around twiddling our thumbs and playing Scrabulous. In fact we’re always making small improvements to the site based on the feedback we get from the Qype community.

So here’s a couple of recent tweaks you may not have noticed yet.

For Qypers on the move we’d added Google Maps to our mobile site (m.qype.co.uk) so now not only can you find the best places nearby, you can get directions as well. All you have to do is select the place you want to visit and then click on the ‘Map’ link. Easy!

Since the release of the new version we’ve had a few people ask us about multiple profile pictures. So now, if you visit your My Qype page, you’ll see a link on your profile pic which allows you to upload more snaps of yourself and change your current mugshot. And don’t forget if you want to browse through all the photos you’ve uploaded to Qype, you can do that on your My Photos page.

There’s plenty of more tweaks to come, but if you’ve got any suggestions for further improvements in the meantime please send them our way or leave a comment on this post.