How’s the food in that new restaurant?  What’s the best place for trendy clothes?  I wish I could find some reliable information on some decent schools for my kids!

This is the type of information we need on a daily basis.  The primary channel for getting such information is marketing messages, but after sustaining years of commercial message bombardment most of us have become savvy enough to know better than to trust the marketing hype.  What’s the alternative?  Asking the people we know, like friends and colleagues, for recommendations based on their experiences is perhaps the most preferred way to shop for anything. Since we know the people making recommendations, it strengthens the validity of their advice.  However, the problem with this approach is that regardless of how social we are, it is often difficult to get the needed information about everything just from one’s own network.

This need gave birth to the idea of harnessing the power of peer recommendations by setting up platforms like epinions.com on the internet where people can share their experiences about all sorts of products and services.  The real value of such information however, depends upon how local and close to home we can get.

The Birth of Yello.pk

There are a number of Pakistani websites providing local listings and such but Samir Feroze, the Managing Director of VeriQual, took this idea to a new level by developing a location-based social networking platform with local listings and a lot more, called Yello.pk.  Yello.pk helps you discover your city, find out about latest happening and events, review local businesses, learn from the experiences of other site users, and express yourself through your very own blog.  Real-time information sharing through a vibrant, opinionated and vocal user community is what creates the value in Yello.pk and sets it apart from similar sites.

Yello.pk is a rapidly growing community of Pakistanis who want to learn about their cities, find what they are looking for and share what they know about the city.  With more than 31,000 monthly visitors, 11,000 plus listed businesses, 4,300 plus daily page views and over 13,000 registered members, it is on the right track to becoming an essential tool for our daily lives.

Super Helpful Features

One of the most powerful features of this site is the blending of local information with location-based maps.  When you search for something like a boutique on Yello.pk the results also display other similar places in the area with relevant details.

“We’ve enabled full street map information on the map. Hopefully you’ll have no trouble locating the best lassi wala in town on a hot day ever again in Pakistan. Simply say where you want to reach and click “GO”. The map will zoom to that location and place the pointer for you,” explains Samir on greenwhite.org .

Similarly, when you checkout the ‘neighborhood’, you’ll find all other yello.pk members in the vicinity and can get instant recommendations based on their experiences by reviewing their profiles.

There are several other user-centric features like SMS functionality.  Each event posted on the site carries a code which can be used to set a reminder by sending a message “reminder code″ to 9355.

A growing community of yellers like Saba has a lot of good things to say about yello.pk, “Absolutely! It has changed our lives radically… Now i don’t have to worry about where i’m going to find a certain thing. All i need to do is go on http://yello.pk, search for that item (be it clothes, jewelry, a new cafe) and this amazing portal not only shows me the locations where i can find that item but also tells me what others think of that place through reviews. :) ” (Commented on: http://cyberdera.com )