Rhode Island, USA based Swift Blue has asked me to invite The Beta News readers to join the alpha test of their local search engine. I’ve previously written about one of Swift Blue’s project, FamFridge, unfortunately a tragic family issue has set them back.
Searoo Local Search is only for the US at the moment, so you need an American zip code to register. Once you’ve registered you can review restaurants and see the reviews for the restaurants in your neighbourhood. There is also a Q&A section, where the users can connect and ask for restaurant, hotel and other recommendations.
Searoo is still in alpha test, so you should prepare for a few dead links and missing options.
You receive points and medals when you review a restaurant . At the moment you can only flash and brag about them.
The email from Swift Blue:
We at Swift Blue, LLC would like to invite you to try out Searoo. Searoo is in alpha testing and we want you to participate in it!
Click here to go to Searoo Alpha.
It’s ok to give out this link to your friends, we are actually encouraging you to send the link to as many people as possible. But please note that the permalinks WILL be changing in the near future, so try not to make too extensive use of them. However, the old ones will work for sometime after the change.
We are inviting you to try Searoo out because the production of FamFridge has been heavily pushed back.
Our CTO and lead engineer had a tragic and immediate family issue to take care and has since left the company because of it. It is unfortunate and we wish him and his family the best.
Because of this departure we have been pushed back on our schedule and we are frantically looking for a new Ruby on Rails developer to bring on.
So it is going to be sometime before we can send you some invites to try out FamFridge, we apologize. In the meantime we want you to try out our newest web application, Searoo.
Thank you,
David Berube
CEO Swift Blue, LLC
20 July, 2007
Beta, Start-Ups, Web 2.0