location based services

Hungry…? Try Foodspotting.

Posted by

0

Find great food around you.

A quick glance through Facebook photos within your network and food pictures are bound to show up on almost every profile. Sharing of food images is not new, but when you overlay a social layer coupled with a recommendation engine… you get Foodspotting!!

Foodspotting is a location-based crowd-sourced food recommendation app that sorts the best dishes in your vicinity based on actual photos shared by visitors to those locations. All that one has to do is snap a photo of a share-worthy dish at a restaurant with the application, tag and share it on Foodspotting or via Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare, etc. So, if you’re famished and would like to grab a bite that has earned its stripes, merits consideration, and is also nearby, simply open the app and browse actual photos. Food spotting is different from other restaurant apps in that it is probably one of the only mobile apps out there that’s focussed on food discovery (not restaurants) and recommendations unlike Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Zagat .

Being able to find directions to a restaurant and read its reviews is helpful, but it’s not fun when you have to sift through them all to know what’s most recommended. The truth is that ‘people really eat with their eyes’ and that’s what makes browsing the Foodspotting interface a pleasurable experience. On opening the app, picture after picture stokes up your appetite while reminding you that some mouth-watering Veal Saltimbocca is just minutes away from you. If you so desire, you can switch to map view and spot all the dishes tagged around you or you can search for a specific item you might have in mind. If a recommendation that matches your search is tagged it should show up (I say ‘should’ because I tried searching for ‘Beefsteaks’ and the closest place featured was somewhere in LA… a little too far to make it worth the effort…right?).

The UI is simple and intuitive. It has what the company terms a “Pandora-like interface” which lets browsers tag dishes as ‘want it’, ‘loved it’, and ‘tried it’. Or, if you choose to not see a particular dish in your listing you can even ‘hide it’.  Categories listed as ‘Specials’, ‘Best’, ‘Nearby’, and ‘Latest’ feature the tagged dishes to select from and it seems like the company consciously chose to avoid cuisine based categorization which can sometimes make the navigation feel clunky.

So far the app has over 1 million downloads and is going strong. I’d give it a thumbs up and am choosing to ignore the ‘Beefsteaks’ incident for now.

Girls Around Me – A twisted lesson in App branding

Posted by

3

Check-in service FourSquare has been around for a while Banjo, Glancee, Gowalla etc. have been around for under a year, but it was not until an iOS app called ‘Girls around me’ created a furor earlier this month that these services have begun to consciously bear the ‘creep’ tag. As described on the website, “Girls around me’ scans your surroundings and helps you find out where girls or guys are hanging out. You can also see the ratio of girls to guys in different places”. An article in Cult of Mac which described it as having “potential to be used as a tool for rapists and stalkers” gained disproportionate attention and eventually FourSquare revoked its API access and the company i-Free Innovations pulled it off the app store with a week.

Stepping back if we compare ‘Girls around me’ with Banjo and Glancee, you’ll realize that they don’t differ much in core functionality.

Banjo aggregates updates and check-ins from the services you, your friends, and people around you already use — like Foursquare, Facebook Places, Twitter (via geotagged Tweets), Gowalla, Instagram, and more. You choose to authenticate yourself with either Facebook or Twitter and in a flash, you have access to a stream of tweets, updates, and check-ins from people in close proximity.

Glancee does not showcase as much as Banjo, but it can identify people around you who share common interests with you; the data being pulled from your Facebook profile.

In my opinion, the attention around the app was more to do with its branding and its Agent Provocateuresque design language than it was to do with its function. And while one could use the app to even scan for guys, the company chose to focus on just one clear market winning aspect of the product. Evidently, the company did itself no favor with this approach, but one can’t fault them for not being focused on clear messaging.  Considering the galaxy of apps out there and the rage and excitement among renegade start-ups over social platforms, powerful branding, messaging, and targeting deserves attention, has clear merit, and should not be overlooked.

One of the key questions in branding is: Who are we talking to and what is the one clear message that we want them to takeaway? So, let’s just assume for a moment that the app was called ‘People around me’ – Would the offering seem as powerful and exciting?