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Donald Trump's 'The Apprentice LA' Runner-up Launches a New Restaurant Geo-Search Engine in Los Angeles

Posted on: Wednesday, 18 February 2009, 09:36 CST

MALIBU, Calif., Feb. 18 /PRNewswire/ -- Zoodango.com officially launches its intelligent geo-search engine in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, started by James Sun, the former runner-up on Donald Trump's show "The Apprentice LA." The show was filmed in Los Angeles for the first time during Season 6 of NBC's business reality show. During the filming, James Sun, the CEO of Zoodango.com, found the LA dining scene to be diverse, abundant, but a bit overwhelming. "It was very difficult to choose where to eat with so many choices, and the online review sites seemed to add to the confusion. I just wanted to quickly find a good place close to where we were shooting each episode," says Sun.

Zoodango.com solves this problem by offering consumers the ability to use computer intelligence and geo-search to quickly find restaurants and lifestyle venues. Zoodango's new angle to finding restaurants, shops, and other businesses is the way you search -- from a bird's eye geographic view of your city. It allows you to see multiple categories of businesses in one location, a task that requires several clicks on sites like Yelp and Google. "We help people plan their whole evening," Sun said in an interview. "Say you want to go to a sushi restaurant, then round two, you want to go get some drinks, then later go on to a club."

Zoodango.com works like your online navigation system. If you type in a specific restaurant, Zoodango shows you the restaurant on a map and simultaneously displays all the nearby places to go before and afterwards. The main difference is that while other sites do searches based on only keywords, Zoodango relies on geo-searches. This is particularly helpful when you are planning an evening out and want to get coffee, eat dinner and go to a bar afterwards. Zoodango's search engine allows you to browse everything in a particular geography and see clusters of different types of venues that you may want to go to.

Zoodango also provides an innovative new way to rate venues. Most venue sites like Yelp use an absolute rating system of 1-5 stars, making it quite common to find multiple sushi restaurants in a specific location with the same score of 4 stars and conflicting reviews. Zoodango offers a unique solution by offering a comparative scoring engine that automatically rates a venue's popularity compared to similar venues in the same city. For example, the engine computes a scientific score (from 0-10) that compares and ranks the sushi restaurants in a specific location with each other. Zoodango's search also offers real-time personalized venue scores. Based on how much you like restaurants and businesses that you have rated, Zoodango's algorithms will predict other venues that you might like.

More information at http://www.zoodango.com.

SOURCE Zoodango.com

Source: PR Newswire

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