2012 felt like the coming of age of food trucks. The once destined place for post-party goers to salivate over fat sandwiches and grease riddled 4th meals of the day is now a daylong enjoyment for everyone. Feeding lunchtime appetites with gourmet deliciousness from the convenience of a kitchen on wheels, food trucks are the most pleasant surprise to go mainstream of the past year.
However, unless you’re an avid Twitter fanatic or are meeting with the trucks regularly to find out where and when they’ll be next, keeping up with your favorite eats is still a problem. And if you’re visiting a foreign city trying to find the “Flying Pig” food truck it inevitably will be realized it’s an incredibly impossible task. The reasons for this are many, for one those driving food trucks may not be tech savvy enough to keep up with the changing mobile climate or the platforms are city specific and there isn’t a consistent usable solution for food truckers and eaters alike.
Bookmarking doesn’t have to be just a Pin or Delicious link save – Grafetee, a new app from a Finland-based startup has developed a ‘world marking’ app. The app allows you to bookmark real-life locations or even locations within websites, which in turn willl allow for businesses to reach users and provide relevant information, such as deals, business information and more.
More then just a travel app, and not a check-in based system like Foursquare, Grafetee can work with any type of business with a physical address, but also can interpret popular travel sites, such as: TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Expedia, Airbnb, and Zillow. Users can tag any location, share information and leave their own comments, which would be expected from any type of discovery, travel, or information type of app.
Swedish startup, Tunaspot, recently launched their new Spotify app that lets you tag a public playlist with a physical location. Once you add the app, you can navigate around your neighborhood or any other geolocation and find other playlists tagged by users to be discovered by business, homes, stadiums, and anything else you can think of.
Once a playlist has been added, other users can freely browse the map to find music that may be associated with a coffee shop, festival, or a club. Each playlist or “tuna”, as its referred to in the app, is given popularity rankings, based on subscriptions and share’s, which will also define what venue is currently “hot”.
Checkmark is another tool in the already filled task management application pool, but its one that had received a lot of buzz prior to its recent launch – and for good reason. The location-based reminders app – an app that can remind you to pick up flowers for the wife, when you pass the mall – takes the limited features of Apples already configured location-based features, but creates a full blown reminders app – when and where you want them.
The “when” aspects of the app are similar to those of other minimalistic task management apps, but the “where” portion of the app lets you create presets based on geo-location, complete with location radius settings, that can then be set as reminders as you arrive or leave the location. The notification sounds can then be set on timers to go off or timed out within minutes or up to an hour of meeting a stated locations’ radius.
Are you single and ready to mingle? If you are, we know sometimes it can be a bit overwhelming – combing through friends of friends to only find out your date hates everything (EVERYTHING), or going on a blind date and finding out they may be racist or panning through web profiles to find out during the date that the “match” is actually the wrong gender (Eeeek). Those may sound like over the top examples, but dating can be work, when really it shouldn’t be. MeetMoi takes the work of finding a date away by sending you matches over the phone while you journey around your city as you always would.
