About 6 months back in far different economy, I convinced my friend Skinner to look for jobs in Silicon Valley. Kudos to him for taking the plunge into a new lifestyle, area, and web 2.0. In the end, he settled down at Yelp and has learned quite a bit in his time there.
While telling people you work at Yelp here is quite the conversation starter here, (especially for girls who LOVE using it) nobody back in Ohio really knew jack about Yelp much to his dismay. When I lectured at Ohio State 2 months back, I actually had a slide of about 10-15 prominent web 2.0 companies and asked the class which ones they knew. To my surprise only Flickr and Twitter were the only two that the entire class knew. No love for Yelp, Hulu, WordPress/Automatic, Glam, and many others. This was disappointing but nothing new to me as technology adoption in fly over states typically lags 1-2 years behind (something that many of us out here often forget). But today, Skinner is in a good mood even though its a Monday. Below is the new Iphone commercial featuring Yelp’s Iphone app. Although Yelp hasn’t made the inroads that it has made on the coasts, it has become such a prominent service that Apple decided to feature it.
