Shake your iPhone, find a restaurant on Urbanspoon

Disclaimer : I help run Urbanspoon and I wrote the app. It'll be available for free when Apple launches the App Store.

Urbanspoon rocks, and this is a great idea. I've wanted something like this for years. :)

I just think about how much different my experience of playing Craps in grade school days could have been. :)

Nice marketing trick. Could do the same thing to make a iphone dice and other amusing things.

Here is another restaurant idea. You could also use the iPhone as a menu, and flip through the entrees and specials like photos. You flip the photo (like in coverflow) and see information like what local farms the ingredients come from, watch a clip of them cooking or growing a special part of it, read or leave comments about it, get information on wines (including links to reviews from Wine magazines)

If it's 199 an iPod Touch soon, and you have a restaurant with 50 seats, it's 10,000 + 50 times the cost of the software to replace your menus with interactive ones. These are better to use (pictures, information, easy to update) and won't have to be reprinted or professionally designed like high end menus. At 25 dollars a software, one 50 seat restaurant is 1,250. One chain with 1000 seats is 25,000. (More if we sell tethers, subtle speaker solutions so the vids can have audio that doesn't disrupt restaurant ambiance, and installation so the touchs don't get stolen).

Imagine how much better that would be for talented chefs. To be able to present more information, better, about their craft on their menus, with the ease of using iLife, and better manage the flow of the front end of the restaurant. I bet they would sell more high end food and wine if they had nice videos of the most expensive food being crafted. They could show off their best or freshest ingredients. It could be managed through a mobileMe like webapp integrated with iLife. It would be a much better experience for the restuarant employees and the customers, and would deepen peoples appreciation for the quality of their food, which would probably get them to spend more on it.

Hey, anyone want to build this with me? It sounds sweet to me.