A few of us from Movaya spent most of the day at the second annual MobileNW conference yesterday at the downtown Seattle Convention Center. I (Phil) was speaking on the Mobile Games and Entertainment panel with a few of my friends from the mobile gaming space up here in Seattle.
It was a nice event put on by the law firm Miller Nash and Mobile Monday. The event gave me a chance to catch up with other folks in the mobile space around town as well as listen to some interesting presentations on different topics like Mobile Advertising and LBS.
My favorite presentation was the demo section where five different companies showed off their stuff. The coolest demo came from Urbanspoon - a Seattle company that (tongue in cheek) claims it is the world's leading provider of time-critical dining data. I had a chance to meet two of the founders, Adam and Patrick, and learn about their company and the product.
If you've never been to Urbanspoon on the web, basically, the site is a guide to neighborhood restaurants that includes menus, maps and links to published reviews by mainstream media, bloggers and site users. It started as a resource for the Seattle area and now includes coverage for over 60 US cities, London, Sydney, Melbourne and four cities in Canada. You can see if your city is covered by Urbanspoon here.
According to Urbanspoon, their website has been growing steadily over the last year and a half and now gets about 1M unique users per month. More interestingly for readers of this blog, Urbanspoon was one of Apple's AppStore launch partners and they have one of the most popular apps on the iPhone.
Urbanspoon on the iPhone is part Magic 8 Ball, part slot machine. You shake your phone and it finds a good nearby restaurant for you. Keep shaking it until it comes back with something you want to try. Urbanspoon uses the iPhone's accelerometer to pick up the "shake", find restaurants near you through GPS, and then skew the results towards restaurants that are highly regarded on Urbanspoon.
Patrick demoed the app to the crowd and I also played with it on my partner's iPhone. It is very cool and very fun. Now we just need to convince them to build the app for other (non-iPhone) platforms. I asked them about that and they told me it is "under consideration".
In any event, if you don't have an iPhone, you should check out Urbanspoon anyway. If you do have an iPhone, the app is available for free on the iTunes App Store for both the original iPhone and the new iPhone 3G. You can download Urbanspoon for the iPhone by clicking here.
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