I have a few favorite companies in the local space. UMI is one - especially after they did their new parking release. LDC is another one - fantastic work they have done in the UK. Add another one to the list - Yipit (furniture search).

I have long railed that there are too many ‘me-too’ companies in the local space. All doing the same with the same set (data, ideas, etc). Yipit is thankfully not one of them.

Having made the odd yet interesting decision to stick with furniture (and in NYC), the team has gone all out in indexing and collating their data. They give actual ‘depth’ to their data - new vs used, cheap vs expensive, antique vs modern, fabric vs leather, a lot of stock vs little choice - these are the magical attributes that change your search from ‘furniture in NYC’ to ‘cheap leather sofa’ - an experience that truly takes us from ‘yellow pages’ to ‘local search’

Their UI does need some work still (for example - why does each furniture store not have its own page that lists all their stuff?) but overall I am excited to see where they take this.