Food Mobile App Menoo Mashes Location, NFC, and Social Into One

You might often find yourself stuck in this situation: while driving or looking around someplace, you’re very hungry but you don’t know what and where to eat. Then you probably tweet asking for any recommendations or find nearby restaurants using directory apps you have.

But, how can you know whether the foods fit your taste, whether the price is acceptable, and where exactly the restaurant is? Menoo, a new mobile app is aiming to solve all that by combining a location-based service, discount vouchers, and a social network to find the best food options nearby.

After a two-month long beta, Menoo launched fully yesterday. There are apps for BlackBerry (pictured above and below), Nokia MeeGo, and Android all ready to roll, with an iPhone version still awaiting approval.

Menoo shows top rated restaurants around your location; by default the app is set to 2 kilometres, but the range can be expanded to up to 50km. If you have a favourite dish in mind already, just type the name and Menoo will show which restaurants nearby serve it, along with users’ ratings (based on serving size and the taste) and reviews of that dish and the entire venue. You can also filter the food results to fit your budget – because, hey, sometimes we run out of money especially at the end of the month.

Menoo's BlackBerry app in action.

The Menoo app comes with some neat features, such as support for NFC (where stores have NFC stickers in place to show you their deals), and Augmented Reality (AR) in the app’s ‘Live View,’ for some street-level meta-scanning of the venues right by you.

The app even integrates with your BlackBerry via its Messenger app (BBM), as part of a special range of BlackBerry tie-ups with Indonesian start-ups that we looked at recently.

Currently Menoo has a database covering Indonesia, Singapore, Thailand, and parts of the USA. More countries will be added over time. Menoo has more than 260,000 POIs (points of interest), from high-end restaurants and cafés, to roadside hawker stalls. There 38,000 POIs in Indonesia alone. Guess how many menus Menoo has? More than 2 million! And surely those numbers will increase as users add new menus.

You can download Menoo for free on Android and BlackBerry smartphones. iPhone users must wait a while, as the app is now under Apple Store review. Soon, it’ll be available on the MeeGo platform on the brand-new Nokia N9 too.

Elasitas, the firm behind Menoo, has commissioned this cute animation as an introduction to the app: