Question to Jeremy Stoppelman, PDG et co-fondateur de Yelp

 Can you tell us about Yelp?
Yelp is a website that connects people with great local businesses – anything from restaurants, bars and spas to hair stylists, dog groomers, even dentists. The site was launched in 2004 in San Francisco, CA and since then, you can now find Yelp in 5 countries including most recently, France. Last month, more than 31 million people leveraged Yelp to help them make a spending decision. 

The market of local search for cell phones has big and small players – how can you differentiate yourself to get people’s attention?
What Yelp has that no one else does is our rich and useful content. With our

What is your strategy for cell phones? What is your target?
We set out to make the experience that you have on Yelp Mobile, as rich as the one you would have on Yelp.com. This started when we launched Yelp for iPhone with Apple's iTunes in July 2008, and since then have you can find Yelp apps for Android, Blackberry, Palm Pre and WAP.
While mobile development still remains a huge focus for Yelp and one that we will continue to innovate against, we've been able to tell by usage and traffic that our original goal of providing a rich offline experience with Yelp, has already started to come to fruition. 

For example, we had 31 million people visit Yelp.com last month to find a great local business. As you'd imagine, we see traffic for the website spike during the weekdays because people are likely at their desks or at home researching restaurants or plans for the weekend. As such, mobile traffic is understandably a little bit lower. However, our weekend traffic for Yelp.com is more or less a mirror image of what we see on the weekday for mobile. Meaning: mobile traffic spikes and Yelp.com traffic dips. But that also gives us a really good idea that people are using their mobile device to find a business on the go. In fact, in the past 30 days we had 1.6 million unique visitors to Yelp mobile.
We hope to continue to iterate on our existing platforms, as well as bring Yelp Mobile to other devices. 

 How can you make profit out of local search on cell phones?
We currently don't monetize any of our Yelp Mobile applications. For us, location-based ads are definitely something we're looking at, but not in the near-term road map. We're currently focusing on getting other platforms like Android and Blackberry up to parity with where we're at on the iPhone, and improving the features of our existing apps. 

Do you have figures on cell phone usage in the countries you are present in?
Over 1.6 million unique visitors leveraged Yelp Mobile last month. 

How do you see the future of local searches on cell phones?
No doubt location and mobile have already proved to be popular topics for 2010, and people continue to buy GPS-enabled phones en masse. For us in particular, we were really excited by the response we saw to our AR feature: Monocle and think that we're just starting to see the possibilities that this technology represents. AR definitely has that "fun factor" but where I also envision it being incredibly useful from a local search perspective is determining instantaneously the information about a business by just holding your phone up in front of it.