You will have to forgive us, at the moment we are finding everything regarding our nationwide launch exciting! We have just received our first nationwide business sign up, and it is a pretty special business at that! The St Fagan’s National History Museum in Cardiff was not only our first business to sign up outside of London, but they were also our first Museum to take control of their listing!

St Fagan’s is one Europe’s foremost open-air museums; it’s also one of Wales’s most popular heritage attractions. The museum is uniquely made up of buildings from different historical periods that have been re-erected in the 100-acre parkland surrounding St Fagans Castle.

By signing up to the site business can take control of their listing, respond to customers reviews and also add more business information.

Welcome aboard St Fagan’s, and ‘hello’ Cardiff!

Let’s hope this is the first of many more lovely nationwide businesses to come!

Wedge Card is the discount card for independent shops and local businesses set up by John Bird, the founder of the Big Issue. Wedge Card aims are simple, to re-vitalise local communities by bringing customers and local businesses a bit closer together. Sound familiar? It should do. Wedge Card and welovelocal.com are a match made in heaven, which is why, from now, on all businesses that accept Wedge Card will appear in welovelocal search results.

Finding great local deals just got that little bit easier.

According Harden’s Restaurant Guide today, a record 158 new restaurants have opened in London in the past twelve months, up 13% on the previous year.

It’s not clear what categorisation this survey has used to define a restaurant distinct from say a cafe or gastro pub, however, given the rate that we are currently adding recently opened eating establishments to welovelocal.com, I would probably peg even this phenomenal boom as conservative compared to the next twelve months.

At our last count, we currently feature over 8,000 eating establishments across eighty categories covering everything from Afghan to Mongolian cuisine, with a few great places to get a proper British fry-up in-between. Either way, it’s a great time to be eating out in London.

You’d have to have been living on a rapidly melting iceberg to have missed the fact that global warming is finally getting the attention it deserves.

Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to attend a very interesting discussion regarding the role web can play in helping reducing carbon emissions. The gravity of the issues discussed were brought most in to focus hearing David Strahan talking about his recently published book The Last Oil Shock which examines the alarming rate that out oil reserves appear to be depleting. While the debate lacked focus at times, it was clear that we can all play a small role in reducing carbon emissions, though subtle changes in the way we live our life.

Smart businesses seem to be switching on to this trend too, recognising that being environmentally friendly is not only ethically commendable, but can also be good for business. For consumers, however, there still seems to be a lot of conflicting information flying about, as each big business tries to out-wit the other touting their green credentials, which is why we’re starting to work on a new feature which will enable businesses to inform their customers on how they are working towards creating greener services and products. Be it, as simple as using only recycled paper and ink cartridges to sourcing all products locally, we hope to add a new dimension to the way people search for local businesses.

From our research so far, there doesn’t seem to be any standardised mode of assessing how green a particular business is in the UK, so in the truest sense of the web, we also intend to allow users to comment on a business’ green credentials in the event that a particular business is over-earnest in their claims.

I’ll keep you posted with more developments as we get ready to launch our new green feature.

tags: Energy 2.0, David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock, etribes

One of the most exciting things about welovelocal.com is that it gives smaller, potentially lesser known businesses a chance to be compared to their bigger competitors based purely on merit rather than their marketing budget, thanks to the reviews and recommendations of their customers.

At a time when small businesses have never faced so much competition from larger multinationals and PLC’s, we hope that welovelocal.com can play its own small roll in readdressing the balance and fighting the emerging ‘Tescopoly’ of our high streets.

It’s happened a lot quicker than expected, but welovelocal.com has just had it’s first business user request verification, it’s all very exciting.

For those of you who aren’t sure what I am talking about, allow me to fill you in. welovelocal.com allows you to claim control over you business listing, meaning you can respond to the reviews written by your locals, and add unique content to your page. To verify your ownership over a business we send out a letter to the businesses listed postal address.

Clean and Dusted, a carpet cleaning business in Soho, will hopefully be the first of many businesses who register with welovelocal.com and take advantage of the services we offer. You can find out more about our business services here.

Welcome aboard Clean and Dusted, it’s going to a lot of fun.