One year ago, food and drink app Forkly was born with the mission of letting users “Eat, Drink and Rate”. Since then it’s been featured on Apple’s app store Hot Picks list twice and has been recognized in the UK, on Mashable in VentureBeat, in TechCrunch and various other news sources.
What is it? Forkly is the creation of Denver-based Martin May and Brady Becker. These guys graduated from TechStars in 2007 with one of (if not THE) first successful location-based tool, Britekite. Remember that app? It was Foursquare before Foursquare even existed. Suffice to say, location based apps are something Martin and Brady know well.
The Forkly team has been steadily improving user experience while growing the user base. In a competitive field of food porn photo apps like Nosh, OINK and Foodspotting, Forkly has maintained course resulting in tens of thousands of new users every month.
The things I love about this app:
+ You can make reservations on Open Table. When you’re on a venue screen look for the ‘Reserve Now’ button.
+ You can buy wine right from the app via wine.com mobile checkout. Look for the ‘Buy This Wine’ button on any wine that’s been posted.
+ Celebrity chefs like Top Chef winner Stephanie Izard, Iron Chef Michael Symon, Brian Boitano, Sondra Bernstein, Bravo’s Around the World in 80 Plates host, Jenna Johansen among others use Forkly.
+ Master Sommeliers Craig Collins MS, Devon Brogile MS and Brett Zimmerman MS (Boulder Wine Merchant)
+ Featured users like Whole Foods, ABC Bachelor Ben Flajnik and Tori Spelling use Forkly to share their tastes.
+ You can cut and paste your “forks” into any blog using the easy HTML code generator.
+ Photo filters for food shots, even in low light settings.
+ The Discover feature is the secret weapon that allows anyone (Forkly user or not) to see food & drink items at places around where they are.
+ You can post photos of anything you eat or drink, it’s not just for food only. And you get points for influencing other peoples’ tastes.
The best is yet to come:
+ Android really is coming soon. Like, soooon.
+ Brands will be able to “claim” their brand in the next few weeks. That means they can see who’s enjoying their product, who’s influential about it and where. What else lets you do that??
+ Restaurants will want to check back over the next week or two. Every restaurant can “claim” their location and manage the venue through the Forkly dashboard. They’ll be able to post photos of items on their menu for people to ‘Discover’ and see who their influential customers are.
It’s been fun to watch Forkly grow over the past twelve months. I’m a big fan of the team behind it, and a big fan of the app. Happy first birthday, Forkly! Can’t wait to see what’s to come in year two.
P.S. Forkly has a little contest going on for their 1st birthday—check it out.
