The new mobile location-based "Check-Out" feature enables users to leave “in the moment” feedback and basic ratings about an experience they’ve just had. Basic ratings are emoticons "Love it," "Meh," or "No Thx," delivered on the way out the door. Additional tips or comments are optional.

Bizzy’s elixir is multi-pronged but very basic. It’s all about recommending local businesses that make the most sense for you as an algorithm matches accumulated “favorites” to users with similar tastes.

The wisdom of the crowd is less relevant on Bizzy than the tastes of like-minded strangers.

Sign-up is required by answering a few fun questions in order to participate in a community where everyone involved contributes to and improves the data set and overall quality of recommendation.

There’s no ranking on Bizzy, just favorites, and the “user-ask” changes writing a review or even a comment to a short-hand rating, with recommendations served up first by quality and second by distance, and users can view them in a list form or on a map.

“You don’t have this 1% or 0.5% of users creating reviews and 99.5% that just read reviews. You have everybody on the site contributing something, and they get something back in return — and the contribution is very small,” says Gadi Shamia, Bizzy Founder. “The key to personalizing the web is making it super easy for people to do stuff.”

Bizzy is funded by ReachLocal, and headquartered in Sunnyvale, California where Shamia oversees seventeen employees. He served as SVP Advanced Product Development at ReachLocal starting in 2009.

Originally from Israel, Shamia was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Storm Ventures from 2008-2009 and developed start-up ideas while advising the investment team about SaaS investments. From 2004 to 2007, Shamia was SVP, Product Management at SAP, responsible for their global small business portfolio.

Bizzy’s evolution of a “Check-In” service to a mobile “Check-Out” app mirrors the evolution of geo-located social media in general.

Bizzy knows whether you are a pizza connoisseur, a vegan, or looking for the best steak in town.

Bizzy just added Foursquare check-in locations to its database to increase listings, and while this doesn’t integrate the two apps, it eliminates a step for users of adding venues already listed on Foursquare.

Bizzy encourages users to share favorites across social platforms and as a result, much of their traffic comes from Google, Facebook, and Twitter. With Facebook centered on social identity, and sites like LinkedIn centered on professional profile, Bizzy is about commercial currency.

Shamia told us, “People love the questions we ask them to answer. It’s missing the ‘document sentiment’ usually surrounding places and services.”

The top cities for Bizzy now are San Francisco and New York, the former for its early adopters and the latter for its high density. The user profile is primarily younger people in their 20’s and 30’s, social, urban and plugged in.

“We get daily e-mails from Canada and the U.K. asking why they can’t have Bizzy there, and almost take it personally that we’re not,” says Shamia.

Bizzy, which also maintains an active Twitter presence and Facebook outreach, is already eyeing international expansion. But its first order of business is “stabilizing the functionality, getting the user experience right, and sorting out mobile versus desktop are our priorities,” he adds.

ReachLocal acquired daily deals site DealOn Media last month for $10 million, paving the way for sponsored links with recommendations.

“Recommendations is our current business and we’re focused on improving the ratio of signals to noise,” says Shamia. But tie-ins with the ReachLocal audience can’t be far behind and monetization options are virtually open-ended.

Even ahead of Check Out’s launch, Bizzy’s Blog notes how people were already “checking out” in real-time with “had dinner at” tweets.

Bizzy converts those kinds of comments into data that rewards you with recommendations tailored to your tastes – and lets service establishments and businesses know if you’ll be coming back again.

When we covered Bizzy shortly after launch last year, Shamia said, “The problem with listing and review sites is they tell you plenty about where you can go, but they never tell you where you should go. Life is too short to read irrelevant reviews or eat at bad restaurants over and over again."

“Most location-based apps are focused on telling your friends where you are. We’ve designed check outs to let users share their opinion of a place in the same amount of time it takes to sign a credit card slip or wait for your date to get back from the bathroom. You don’t have to wait to get home to write up a review anymore,” says Shamia.