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consti

Tupalo

We revisited our spot page – tell us what you think!

We revisited our spot page to show you guys more information on the local business you’re looking for at first glance! Additionally, we’ve been searching for a more visually interesting way to display the many pictures we have (we recently hit the rolling average of 170 uploads a day!) and with the new design, we believe we found it!

Our new spot pages empathize more on (your!) reviews, getting rid of some unnecessary white-space. And we decided to move our recommendations for your city up a bit, displaying them in the right hand corner.

But enough with this writing about something you can see for yourself! Take it for a spin and tell us what you think. :)

December 11, 2012 by
Community

Just a heads up: we’ve improved navigation

You might have noticed our new and improved search already. For those of you who did not: go ahead, take it for a ride! For those of you who have, let me tell you a little more about why we changed it.

The old navigation bar did not offer enough space to show you recommendations, we needed a drop-down menu for that. A huge improvement is the auto-completion for cities and categories, making searching for – say an Italian restaurant in Vienna – way easier. Plus, before it wasn’t that easy to switch between cities, we decided to move to ‘find x in y’, for a more seamless and intuitive navigation experience, where everything is in one place!

With the new navigation we put the fun back in searching. Search for coffee roasters in Vienna and you’ll find espresso bars, neatly ranked and (when available) with a picture! Fat chance you’ll find the place to have dinner!

restaurants Vienna

We’d be happy to hear what you guys think of our new search experience as well as feedback and suggestions for future features or improvements to the website! Thanks!

October 16, 2012 by
railsgirls application
Ruby and Rails, Team, Tupalo

Girls, learn Rails, we’ve got unicorns. And raptors.

Hi! This weekend I was a coach at the Rails Girls workshop in Munich (@RailsGirls_MUC). Rails Girls aims to open up technology and make it more approachable for women. This edition was the third time I could teach girls all about the wonderful world of Ruby on Rails.

railsgirls Munich

Around 50 girls participated, and the Deutsche Welle was there to film the whole thing. My group made a neat little app to list ideas. It has unicorns. And raptors! I’d greatly recommend anyone to attend a Rails Girls conference, if only for the good vibes and playful learning environment.

railsgirls application

The next Rails Girls workshop will take place in Zurich, on the second and third of November. Fellow Tupalo developers Michi, Johannes and I will be coaches there. Rails Girls is free and open to all enthusiastic girls! Apply now, for applications are only open until October 19. And do follow @RailsGirls_ZRH on Twitter for the latest news.

October 15, 2012 by
Community, German

Bewertungs Richtlinien

Authentizität und Relevanz
Seid ehrlich! Schreibt über eure wirklichen Erlebnisse und Erfahrungen als Kunde eines Unternehmens. Eine gute Bewertung soll weder jemanden persönlich angreifen noch gemein oder gar beleidigend ausfallen. Wenn sich alle an dieses Credo halten profitieren alle Beteiligten am meisten.

Interessenskonflikte
Bewertungen sollten authentisch, objektiv und vor allem unbeeinflusst sein.
Sprich – keine Eigenbewertungen und Bewertungen von Mitbewerbern. Keine “geschönten” Bewertungen von Freunden und auch keine Bewertungen des eigenen Arbeitgebers (egal ob positiv oder negativ).

Persönliche Anfeindungen
Nachdem das Internet kein rechtsfreier Raum ist, seid ihr als User letztendlich auch für abgegebene Bewertungen verantwortlich. Wie im echten Leben, haben auch auf Tupalo.com persönliche Angriffe in nicht adäquater Sprache – sei es gegen Unternehmen oder Personen gerichtet – keinen Platz! Von Beschwerden über die Mitarbeiterpolitik von Unternehmen, Sexismus, Bigotterie und anderen Anstößigkeiten ist in jedem Fall Abstand zu nehmen. Am besten ihr schreibt eine Bewertung so, wie Ihr Sie die dem Unternehmer auch ins Gesicht sagen würdet.

Erfahrungen aus zweiter Hand
„Der Onkel meines Bruders und dessen Ehefrau hat gesagt dass,…“ – Bei solchen Schilderungen solltet ihr immer vorsichtig sein. Eine gute Bewertung ist nur dann eine gute Bewertung wenn ihr auch selbst diese Erfahrung gemacht hat. Beim „Hören-Sagen“ ist bisher noch nie etwas gutes rausgekommen.

Plagiarismus
Bitte postet keine Plagiate von anderen Seiten – wenn ihr eure Bewertungen von anderen Services auf Tupalo.com noch einmal abgeben wollt, so nutzt doch die Gelegenheit evt. neue Erfahrungen in die Bewertung einfliessen zu lassen.

Form und Länge von Bewertungen
Bitte schreibt keine 2-Wort-Bewertungen, oder versucht nur ein Sterne zu vergeben ohne auch nur ein Wort über das Unternehmen zu verlieren. Ein Unternehmen ausschließlich mit dem Wort „Cool“ zu beschreiben ist eher kontraproduktiv. Derartige Bewertungen werden auch meistens von den Tupalo.com Usern übersehen und als irrelevant abgetan. Also – Grund genug um bei der nächsten Bewertung ein wenig Hirnschmalz reinzustecken und eine schöne, ausführliche, informative, besondere, herausragende, beschreibende, ehrliche, bestechende, korrekte und faire Bewertung abzugeben. Enjoy!

January 17, 2011 by
Community

Review Guidelines

Authenticity and Relevance
Keep it real folks. Write only about your honest, real-life experiences as a customer of businesses or services without getting personal or abusive. Follow this guideline and we’ll all live happily together.

Conflict of Interest
Reviews should be authentic, objective and, above all, unbiased. If you feel there is any form of conflict, please do not post the review. For example, owners should not review their own business or competitors NOR have their friends write shill reviews in order to make their business look more positive. In addition, employees shouldn’t review their current employers, nor rant about employment policies.

Personal Attacks
You are ultimately responsible for what you’ve written, so do not include forms of language which may be construed as defamatory or slanderous against the particular business. Rants about the employment policies of certain businesses, hate speech, sexism, bigotry and other lewdness is uncalled for and will result in our filters removing your reviews. Just keep it real.

Second-hand Experiences
Avoid hearsay. For example, don’t give a negative review to a restaurant just because your mother’s uncle’s cousin didn’t like his turkey on rye. Your reviews should be just your experiences – not someone else’s.

Plagiarism
Try not to copy and paste reviews from other services. If you wrote them, then by all means we’re happy to have you on Tupalo, but maybe now’s the time to refresh your past reviews with updated information?

Blank and Two-word Reviews
Don’t just post a blank review or a two-word review. “Cool” is not as informative as you may think and many will just ignore the message you’re trying to get across. Come on, flex your head and write at least a sentence – or maybe 10.

January 17, 2011 by
Announcements

Speak to Search

Hi! I’m Constantin, one of the Software Engineers at Tupalo.com.

I’ve just come back from this year’s Google Developer Day in Munich (pictures on Twitter), where I had the chance to listen to fantastic talks by Google Advocates and to meet other people in the Google Universe! One of the interesting things that got my attention was the support for speech recognition in the latest versions of Chromium. Paul Kinlan and his colleague Michael Mahemoff did a great job in showing off some of the new HTML5 features that Chromium and Chrome support!

Since we love to try out new stuff that we think contributes to the experience of our users, we’ve added speech recognition to our search.
If you happen to use the latest version of Chromium/Chrome, you should see a little microphone icon in the search field. Click on it and say what you want to search for!

If you don’t happen to have the latest version of Chromium or are using another browser which does not support the ‘speech’ attribute yet, here’s a video of me searching for ‘chinese restaurant’:

Just go to any spot or city page and try out “Speak to Search”.

November 10, 2010 by
Announcements, Tupalo

Add Media to local business listings via embed.ly

Whenever you’re planning to go to a restaurant or bar, you probably look for photos of or other visual information about that local business. In most cases there are a lot of photos and maybe even videos of such spots out there in the world wide web, yet there’s no real central storage for them.

Photos, videos, articles or other relevant snippets from the web that are affiliated with a spot can now be added to specific spots on Tupalo.com. For registered users, we’ve just added the “Add Media” link to every listing, which allows you to add any spot-related information to a specific spot by simply pasting the URL of the primary source.

As you can see from the image to the left, there’s really a LOT of resources that are being built into this feature – and all of that thanks to a super-cool startup called Embed.ly that has enabled the technology to integrate all those services at once.

Be it from Facebook, CNN or Slideshare just paste the URL and – boom – a spot just got so much more richness to it.

By sharing bits and pieces of widely distributed information on Tupalo.com spots, we’re sure that your next experience will be even better through Tupalo.com.

Enjoy!

September 17, 2010 by
Uncategorized

Now showing the best spots for expats in the Netherlands

xpatTogether with the nice people over at xpatrenals.com, a site providing apartments and flats for expats, we’re happy to announce that we started a collaboration showing xpatrentals.com users the best spots around certain appartments. Similar we did with our friends at Immobilien.net in Austria, we are now serving the the best and closest around certain apartments for young, international people in the Netherlands.

Check out this apartment for example and see what’s around.

January 11, 2010 by
Announcements

Tupalo.com moving north – Finland!

fonecta_logo_rgbAfter going live in the Netherlands and Poland, today we are announcing our full-throttle launch in Finland! Since our collaboration with our finnish data provider and strategic yellow pages partner FONECTA was harmonious and slick, within only several weeks of preperations, agreements, translations and local market research, we wanted to bring Tupalo.com to Finland as soon as possible.

With FONECTA as our partner aside from existing partners HEROLD.at, De Telefoongids and PKT.pl, Tupalo.com is now serving 2,5 Million valid and up to date business listings. The agreement not only entails a data integration, but also collaboration in terms of PR, Marketing and local events.

Today’s announcement is another crucial step for us to become a major European player in the social yellow pages space. Again, thanks to our finnish friends who helped us prepare this step thoughtfully. Tell your finish friends that Tupalo.com is about to arrive and that should NOW start adding and reviewing their favorite restaurants, share the best doctors, or recommend local salons.

Sinun Tupaleros!

December 14, 2009 by