Real People, Real Reviews

We need to review and map at least one million restaurants all over the world in Mapsofworld.com. So, it was important we laid down a benchmark to judge what goes in and what doesn’t.

As step one, I started reviewing restaurants for Yelp. It was interesting. If you wish to write, you need to read. A few years down the lane having done a few reviews and having read hundreds of them, one felt confident that our time to start reviews had come. A few reviews done in Bay Area and one felt confident that it is possible to put a template around. We assigned our colleague in San Jose office to do a few reviews on that draft template and evolve one further. She put her heart and soul to it and did a few reviews for us. It kind of worked out. We had a framework in hand and decided to do a pilot city.

Our first city was Santa Cruz, CA. Not too far from our office, Santa Cruz is home to a dear friend and a close business associate, who liked the idea, and, to our pleasure, decided to do 40-50 restaurants in Santa Cruz. By then we had done close to 50 restaurants in the Bay Area and some other parts of the world. We went ahead. As they say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Today, we have a lot of restaurants whose puddings we have eaten and can say which ones are really good. Santa Cruz Restaurant Review Project became a cornerstone for us. Since then we have successfully worked on two more cities, Bangalore and San Francisco. Now we feel we are almost there,  we have the format and this format is scalable to include restaurants from all over the world.

Today, we also feel confident that we can scale up by crowdsourcing and that’s something good for us to try out. More would happen as we put a crowdsourcing platform in place and get going. Our reviewers would soon be near you.