If you are looking for new places to hang out in town, check out www.onyomo.com for reviews and contact details

Do you like to get all your info on the go? Would it be nice if someone could text you the address of a restaurant you are planning to visit before you head for a leisurely Sunday brunch? Would it be nicer if you could find about the educational institutes in a city you are new to? If the answers to all these questions is ‘yes’, check out www.onyomo.com.

OnYoMo.com is a city search portal that provides information on an exhaustive list of services, including movies, restaurants, shopping, educational institutes, florists, chemists and beauty salons. The service is available in Calcutta, Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Chandigarh and some parts of Goa.

“I like the fact that when you are browsing through the ‘See All’ link, you can actually get a very good list,” says 23-year-old management consultant Lisa Chakraborty. And its detailed list of educational institutes may come in handy for students.

But it isn’t just its search portal functions that makes OnYoMo.com cool. “We want people to connect better with their cities and share their knowledge about them. One may know about all the restaurants in a particular city, but there is no incentive to share your knowledge and your opinions about the places. So we launched this system of community credits,” explains Shailesh Mehta, CEO, OnYoMo.com. Community credits are reward points that you can earn by reviewing restaurants/movies in town, voting on a review written by others or voting on a city issue. As an introductory offer, users are being awarded 100 Community Credits for registering with the service, and 25 Community Credits for every successful invite they send out.

The best news for youngsters with limited means is that on earning 500 credits they can be redeemed for Rs 500 worth of services from partner sites. This function should be running in two weeks. “Users can redeem points for the exact amount of credits from select online movie booking agencies, online shopping websites and hotel and flight booking agencies,” says Mehta.

What’s to stop you from writing bogus reviews then? Other people, says Mehta. “We have a pretty strict terms-of-use policy. If a user is accused of spamming or is reported as writing spam, his/ her account could be suspended/terminated. All their Community Credits could lapse as well,” he says.

But it will take time for a service such as this to gain acceptance. “I would go for more well-known restaurants and depend on its word-of-mouth reputation. So all I would need is contact details,” says Raj Chatterjee, a master’s student of information systems and management.