Posted 01/25/2011 at 2:14pm | by Stuart Gripman With the annual Macworld Expo upon us, iPhone-wielding fans of all things Apple will descend upon our beloved San Francisco. For those of you who’ll be joining us, we’ve put assembled a short list of must-have apps. Load these on your ’Phone or ’Pad and you’ll confidently navigate the City’s many splendors. Might want to load these before you arrive, though. AT&T’s 3G coverage here is less than ideal, and with the VeriPhone still weeks away, you could find your evening slipping away while your downloads trickle in. Oh and one bit of advice: don’t ever ever use the term “Frisco.” Getting around the region without a car usually means catching a Bay Area Rapid Transit train. You can call it BART. With stations in four counties and connections to transit providers serving at least five more, BART is the backbone of regional Read More

There's a great piece in the New York Times today about the growing practice of using mobile apps to find and review restaurants. The way it works is simple for customers. Just pull out your phone (or your iPad), launch the app and find what's nearby. Initially, OpenTable was the only app that could be used to make reservations. Now UrbanSpoon offers them as well, and customers are taking advantage. They're testing the idea in LA and Seattle, with 50 and 100 restaurants participating, respectively. Once you've eaten you can post a review. These are sorted by date, so those paying attention can see if a given place is on a slide or an upswing. Even without these apps, I'll use my iPhone to search "coffee" or "hamburgers" with the Maps app to find a place in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Taking it that extra step -- placing a reservation -- is, Read More

OpenTable, an app for finding and reserving spots at restaurants, has updated its iPhone software to include a few new features. You can now search for restaurants by name, rather than searching by location or category. That’s a no-brainer feature, since not everyone is looking to discover something new, but rather know exactly where they want to eat. On that note, you can also save and manage restaurants as favourites for quick access later, and get a list of your search history to find entries you had looked up previously. Reservations can now be made a full month in advance, and as usual, you can map out directions to particular locations. OpenTable initially launched their service on iPhone a little over a year ago, and has since spread to webOS, BlackBerry, and Android. The standalone app is nice and all, but I think OpenTable’s primarily useful as licensing partners for applications like Viigo and Poynt. If Read More

By Chris Hall on March 1st, 2010 Here are the four best apps for finding a place to eat, brought to you by the never ending hunger of Chris Hall. I’ve been hungry lately. Real hungry. Some hunger is conquered by Chipotle, but this hunger is only has one weakness, and it is good, local food. Fortunately for all of us in the same situation, there are plenty of apps for that. Here are the four best, brought to you by the never ending hunger of Chris Hall. 4. Yelp – I really like Yelp when I’m looking for a place to eat. Because of its vast user base, the Yelp app provides more restaurants per search than any other app I’ve found. There are also more customer review on Yelp than any other service, so if you believe that more is better, Yelp is for you. The problem with Yelp Read More

...that there is no speed skating, downhill skiing, hockey, or even curling on MSNBC, I’m completely reliant on apps to run my life. Last night I us... Read More

I recently discovered a new iPhone app called OpenTable, which lets you search for restaurants and place reservations right from your iPhone. I’m amazed I haven’t discovered this app prior to now; it’s certainly proved its usefulness in just a couple days on my iPhone. As I was placing Valentine’s Day dinner reservations The Portland City Grill’s website this past weekend, I noticed a little button on the side of the web page with the recognizable “iTunes App Store logo.” Like a true iPhone junkie, I instinctively clicked on it to see what app they were linking to. Sure enough, it loaded up iTunes and brought me to OpenTable’s app page. As the app was free, I immediately downloaded and installed it to see how it would stack up. Would I actually be able to check my favorite restaurants for open reservation times, while I’m out and about without having to Read More

You know the foodie in your life. He or she is that person who will drag you miles away from your home to try out a new restaurant that they've heard about, or will spend hours cooking up an "experiment" in the kitchen, only to decide at the last minute to go out to eat. Finding the perfect gift for the Apple-owning gourmet in your life doesn't need to be an exercise in futility. Follow along as I bring you five ideas that are sure to keep your foodie friend on his or her journey to palatable perfection. 1) The first -- and one that I use on a regular basis -- is actually a free present that you can provide. OpenTable [Free, iTunes Link] is a service that is used by many foodie-friendly restaurants to capture reservations. You'll need to sign your gift recipient up for a free account, but Read More

The Smarter Cities series is supported by IBM. Read more about building a smarter planet on the IBM A Smarter Planet Blog. Social media has certainly changed the way we interact and the way we do business, but the way we eat? No really, it’s true: social media is positively affecting virtually all aspects of our lives, including how we find, sell, and eat food. From helping restaurants connect with customers in new and innovative ways to helping consumers locate good eats, social media and the web are making our cities more delicious places to live. In this post we’ll look at some of the ways that social media is giving small food businesses the power to promote themselves and find new customers, as well as how it is providing city dwellers with the tools to find great (and safe) food. How else is social media making your city tastier? Let Read More