MobileCrunch interviewed Urbanspoon cofounder Ethan Lowry yesterday revealing some interesting insights into the 10th most popular iPhone application. The application provides a database of restaurants covering major cities in the United States and Canada (as well London in the UK and both Sydney and Melbourne, Australia). All’s you do is enter some of the specifics into your iPhone like price range and number of people, shake your phone and it’ll find a matching restaurant in your area. These are some of the key points that really got me thinking:
- Urbanspoon totalled 2.2 million downloads to snag the number 10 spot
- application launched July 10, cracked 1 million downloads at the beginning of November
- featured in an Apple commercial beginning in November obviously improving their traffic levels, sometimes had 5000 shakes per minute during primetime
- monetize using AdMob ads
- advertisers are missing the boat when it comes to taking advantage of location
- 70 million overall shakes
- will likely develop an Android and Blackberry Urbanspoon app in the future
- tons of room for improvement in Apple’s app store layout and feature set
The interview is definitely a good read. I’d recommend it to anyone interested in learning some of the behind-the-scenes happenings in the iPhone application development world.
You can check out Urbanspoon’s website online or download it from the app store.
