When you search on Google Maps for restaurants, apartment complexes, bars, etc. you will find reviews on the places that users submit.  MapQuest will be taking a similar approach, but will be powered by Yelp reviews.  Out of the deal, MapQuest gets more local content and Yelp gets more traffic.  It’s a win-win.  Yelp receives a lot of traffic, but their core visitors live and work in Silicon Valley. 

MapQuest will also have sports news integrated into the personalized local version of the map website.  MapQuest has released a BlackBerry-version of the site and will be releasing an iPhone app in the near future.  MapQuest’s personalized local version of the site has received 3.3 million unique visitors thus far.  MapQuest as a whole receives about 48 million unique visitors.

MapQuest Local already aggregates videos from Truveo, news from Topix, Events by CityGuide, weather from WeatherBug, movies from Moviefone, sports from Topix, used car listings from AOL Autos, City’s Best for things to do, classifieds from Zaango, and pictures from Flickr.  Using all these widgets, it’s hard to tell whether the site is actually MapQuest or not.

AOL acquired MapQuest for $1.1 billion in December 1999.  Yelp has raised $31 million since starting in 2004 from Max Levchin, Bessemer Venture Partners, Benchmark Capital, and DAG Ventures.

Slide.com, the photo slideshow website has raised a third round of funding from Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund. According to VentureBeat, the amount of funding for the third round is undisclosed, but there are rumors circulating that it is over the second round of $8 million. Based on third round funding estimations, Slide is currently worth near or over $20 million.

Creating a slideshow with Slide is done in 3 simple steps from the arrange page. The three steps are: 1.) Create a Slide Show, 2.) Save Slide Show, and 3.) Share Slide Show. There are 4 presets to scroll pictures: Sliding, Stars, Collage, and Checker. Photos can be directly imported from your PC hard drive, Photobucket account, Flickr account, MySpace account, or direct URLs. There are also several themes and sizes to alter these slide shows.

One of the co-founders of Slide is Max Levchin, a co-founder and former CTO of PayPal. Levchin is from Kiev, Ukraine, then moved to Chicago to attend UIUC. After PayPal went public in 2002 and his 2.3% stake was converted into $34 million after the eBay acquired PayPal, Levchin started Slide in 2004.

Levchin had also created Yelp, a review-centric social network. Previous investors include Founders Fund, BlueRun Ventures, and Peter Theil, the other co-founder of PayPal. Levchin aims to make money by adding sponsored pictures in slide show image crawls. Currently, Slide and Yelp are based in San Francisco. SFGate.com has a detailed history of Levchin’s past.