James Sun

Zoodango.com founder James Sun, best known around these parts for his strong showing on Donald Trump's "The Apprentice," is taking his Seattle Internet startup in a new direction. The 11-person company -- which originally built a social network to connect people in face-to-face meetings  -- is now touting a hyperlocal "geo search engine." What's that? The idea is to help people find local businesses -- bars, restaurants, art galleries, etc. -- without inputting keywords like you do on Google Maps, Yelp or other sites.

Zoodango has elements of a number of services, from Yelp and CitySearch to Meetup and Evite to Urbanspoon and Restaurants.com. And once the company's iPhone app launches in a few months, it also will take on mobile location-based services like Loopt and Whrrl. I asked Sun, a 31-year-old University of Washington graduate, whether Zoodango is taking on too much. He doesn't think so.

"I think people want it," said Sun. With a lot of local search services, Sun argues that you have to know what you are looking for before you search. That contrasts with Zoodango, which he said allows people to look on a map to find local "clusters" of businesses.

The scoring engine to rate the local businesses also is different than Yelp or CitySearch, driven by the number of times that users hit a button saying "I Like It." Sun says that solves the problem of finding 40 Chinese restaurants all of which have four star ratings. On Zoodango, the restaurants are compared against one another and the ratings (on a 1 to 10 scale) are always changing, he said.

Facing a threat from Facebook, Sun made the strategic decision last year to move the business away from the local social network concept. The company soon started tinkering with a way to combine elements of the old business with a local search offering, helping people find discounts at nearby businesses.

It is a cool idea, being able to search what's around you on a map. I gave it a try for my address and pulled up a decent number of local businesses, though the reviews and scores are lacking a bit.   People may stick closer to home during these tough times, so a local search play could work. On the flip side, people aren't going to be spending as much money as they once did in local shops.

Zoodango has a 4-pronged revenue model. It plans to charge consumers a monthly fee to gain access to premium coupons, 2-for-1 dinners and the like. It also plans to charge merchants to submit coupons and other promotions to the site. Later this year, it also will unleash what Sun calls "geo classifieds" -- essentially helping people find products for sale from those who live close by. Finally, it has a licensing deal in place with an undisclosed partner, a deal that Sun vaguely described as a "virtually untapped market."

Zoodango raised a little more than $1 million in funding last year from local angel investors such as Alliance of Angels Chairman Dan Rosen, former Microsoft exec Scott Oki, Classmates.com founder Randy Conrads and others.

“We are very excited about the potential of what Zoodango can do by offering a personalized venue search engine similar to what Expedia did for travel and Amazon did for books," said Rosen in the release.

At this point, the service is available in Seattle, Spokane, San Francisco and Portland. It plans to expand to other west coast cities, including LA, San Diego, Phoenix and Tucson in the coming weeks.