Fill Your Belly at 4G Speed

Having mobile broadband devices might be seen a way to meet some of our major human needs: communication and companionship. With our friends accessible at a moment's notice, we can feel happy and loved with a few taps of the screen. Recently, wireless Internet applications have been developed to try to meet another one of our major needs: food. Various applications all go about meeting this need in various ways, but in the end all have the same goals: getting us a tasty meal at a decent price.



One of the best known food-related applications for smart phones is Urbanspoon, which uses phones' GPS to locate nearby eateries. Urbanspoon is probably best known for its slot machine-like interface, which allows people to "lock" wheels relating to type of cuisine, price range, and neighborhood in a particular area before "spinning" the wheels and allowing Urbanspoon to come up with a nearby restaurant recommendation. While Urbanspoon is generally easy and fun to use, the part of the application interface where the restaurant reviews are housed is somewhat clunky and difficult to access.



Restaurant reviews, in any event, are largely seen as the bread and butter (so to speak) of another player in the food application industry: Yelp. Yelp's application integrates reviews into a locator of restaurants similar to that of Urbanspoon, and is rapidly becoming the smart phone application of choice for foodies on the go. However, when reading Yelp reviews, it is difficult not to think of the accusations against Yelp made by several restaurants, charging that Yelp basically extorted them into paying for services from Yelp on pain of placing negative reviews on their website or making sure that negative reviews stayed there.



Another useful food application is OpenTable, which like its peers can locate restaurants using phone GPS. The advantage of OpenTable is that it is integrated into an established website for making restaurant reservations. Therefore, it's easy to check reservation availability during a long period of time for any restaurant on the OpenTable network and make reservations more quickly and easily than attempting to call a busy restaurant.



Perhaps the newest frontier in mobile food applications is represented by Groupon's "Next" project. Groupon has already had a great deal of success—the company was nearly purchased by Google for an astonishing $6 billion—in sending out limited-time only coupons for drastically reduced restaurant meals and other goods and services. The idea behind the Groupon business model is that people induced to patronize a particular business by the low Groupon rate will eventually become regular customers. Groupon "Next" is planning to get customers to purchase restaurant meals by offering discounts at "off" times, say for lunch between 3 and 5 p.m., in order to reach hungry customers for whom price is a major consideration. Businesses who plan to participate in this project hope that these customers will return for full-price meals during more busy hours.



A Clear wireless internet subscription will allow you to access all of the newest food-related smart phone applications. CLEAR WIRELESS INTERNET information is readily available to help you find the service best for you.