Here's an interesting bit of news: the founder of PayPal has backed Yelp!, a service which helps you organise recommendations for local services.

I've been thinking a lot about local services recently, in relation to mobile (of course). Why doesn't Vodafone Live! or OrangeWorld have a "My Brighton" or equivalent menu on it - containing local event listings, the front-page headline from the local newspaper, classifieds I might have demonstrated an interest in, information from the council about my area (when the bins are being collected would be nice), other demographic information?

All this stuff is out there, and (gasp) it's relevant to me even when I'm away from my desk, or TV. And, tying in with the long tail... whilst information on Brighton might be of little value to someone in Liverpool, working out a way to deliver location-specific info to (say) residents of the largest 50 towns and cities in the UK would be incredibly useful. I suspect that the answer lies in doing deals with local newspaper syndicates, centralised sources of information, and local councils...

We're trying to push this along, of course. But I can't help feeling that it's more important that this gets done, than that we get to be the guys who do it.

Mike@FP just told me about a service Bell Canada run, which lets you dial *directly* into the voicemail of the person you're calling - so their phone doesn't ring and you get to leave them a voice message.

He was talking about it in the context of "this is way better than SMS because it means you can be so much more expressive, without having to actually talk to anyone", but it struck me as a great service - tying into a load of existing infrastructure, and building both voice call and voicemail revenues (which are important to operators) at the same time as providing a new(ish) way of communicating...

Update: Robert tells me that this is, in fact, possible on Orange in the UK - dial your voicemail number, press 2 and you're taken through the process. You can't send messages direct from your address-book though, which is a shame because only freaks remember phone numbers these days.

Walter also comments on this post to say that 3 in Australia (and presumably elsewhere) let you do this.