Qype - Live and tell

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!

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!

Fancy winning a trip to the Big Apple? Yep, us too. That’s why we really don’t want to tell you about the fantastic prize draw this month. We want to win tickets to New York City ourselves.

All you have to do is click any of the bright red links, and answer the easy peasy question. If you want an extra ticket (to take Siany with you maybe?) then just review a new venue in town or invite some more mates to join in the Qype fun.

So just keep doing what you’re doing already and then our friends at Virgin Atlantic could be whisking you off to the other side of the world.

We’ll sit patiently waiting for our invite.

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.

To quote Brad Pitt:

“The first rule of Qype Club is to write more reviews. The second rule of Qype Club is to write more reviews!”

Ok, so that’s not a direct quote, but it’s true: the more reviews we have on Qype the more useful and fun the site becomes. So in an effort to encourage our users to write up their experiences of local places we’re introducing a bit of an incentive.

Over the next few days we’ll be giving away a pair of Odeon cinema tickets for every 20th review submitted to Qype UK.

All you have to is submit your stories/experiences/critiques as you normally would and if you’re the lucky twentieth (or fortieth, or sixtieth… etc) reviewer then we’ll send out a couple of gift vouchers to you straight away.

And, while we’re talking about special offers, don’t forget that all you have to do is tag your next review with ‘virginwines’ and you’ll automatically get a £40 Virgin Wines voucher.

You might remember that, way back in November, we attended the London Bloggers Meetup and had a great time chatting to the assembled writers, photographers, artists and vloggers.

In fact we enjoyed the event so much that we got in touch with organiser Andy Bargery and asked if we could do anything to help out with future meetups.

So we’re happy to announce that we’ll be supporting the next gathering of London-based bloggers by putting a bit of money behind the bar and offering a nice little prize for the best Qype review of the pub where the event’s held.

Put a big red circle around the 29th of January in your diaries right now, and head on over to Meetup.com to let Andy know you’re coming.

The venue is the Camel and Artichoke pub on Lower Marsh in Waterloo and everything kicks off at 7pm.

We’ll see you there!

There’s an interesting article over at Web2.0 gossip site Techcrunch UK about the clubber’s networking site Don’t Stay In.

TCUK calls the community ‘the biggest social networking site you’ve never heard of’ and it does seem that the clubbing fraternity have really embraced it and turned it something pretty useful.

If you read the post you’ll see Qype gets mentioned as a competitor to Don’t Stay In, and while that’s not entirely accurate (although you can check out our club reviews here), there’s some definite similarities, and it’s great to see another local/social community like this really finding its niche and helping out its users.

So do any Qype users also use Don’t Stay In? Is there one thing they do that makes them great? Could we learn anything from them? Let us know in the comments.