Sharing stories about food is what Malaysians and Singaporeans love to do anywhere, any time – sit down with a bunch of newly met acquaintances at a street stall, pub or restaurant, and the conversation will almost inevitably turn to good food, and where to find it.
This is where Wootfood comes in. Developed by Malaysian accelerator Alphapod, Wootfood is a food-discovery app for Android and iOS that allows you to snap pictures of food, tag it with the restaurant’s location, upload it on the web, and find recommended dishes and restaurants.
This sounds like what hot New York startup Foodspotting (“a visual guide to good food and where to find it”) does, and it’s a fact that Wootfood’s founders, TJ Tee and Clayton Narcis, admit to.
“It’s about 90% of what Foodspotting is,” Narcis said during a presentation of the app soon after it was launched earlier this month.
Work on Wootfood started about a year ago, with Narcis and Tee labouring on the project in their spare time. They realized the price of the slow-burning process when Foodspotting was launched while Wootfood was still being developed – and unfortunately, Foodspotting did just what Narcis and Tee were planning.
There is little bitterness from the founders, however, aside from saying, “we were first to think it”. Their strategy now is to focus and tweak Wootfood to the cultural nuances of the Southeast Asian market – which explains why they released Wootfood only to the Malaysia and Singapore App Stores.
How it works
The first impression of Wootfood is its simplicity. When the app is launched, it displays the nearest listed dishes and restaurants within a couple of kilometers. Unlike Foursquare, the relative location is quite accurate, give or take five meters. The process of signing up through the app is pretty easy, and you’re given the option to register with Facebook Connect.
Adding photos of dishes to the Wootfood database is simple and fast, and there are prompts to add information such as price, opening hours, opening days, and descriptive food tags. Aside from adding food pictures, users can also opt to give “noms” to specific dishes – which is the equivalent of saying “I’m eating this” – as they have to be very close to the dish’s location to give a nom.
If you’re away from the location, there’s also the option to like or dislike a particular dish, providing feedback to help other users decide whether this dish should be ordered or avoided.
Another good thing about Wootfood is that dish recommendations are place-specific, so users can easily look at what’s good to eat in a particular restaurant, as opposed to a general area.
The amount of noms and dishes discovered builds up points for your user profile, which allows you to unlock badges like Cherry Pop, Triple Play and Marathon – although the criteria for earning these badges will only be known once you unlock them.
Information, please
As with all user-generated content platforms, Wootfood relies heavily on people contributing to the database: No users, no information, no point. A casual glance now reveals scant information on eateries and food items, and the number of likes to a particular dish usually numbers just a couple.
But the database is growing, according to the founders, as there are about 150 dishes added per day, with about 1,000 restaurants listed in the database. Most of these restaurants are located in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya in Malaysia, with the Singapore database being quite nascent at the moment.
Granted, it’s barely been a month since Wootfood was launched. And with a growing install base that stands at 3,500 users as of last week, there is promise that Wootfood would eventually be useful enough for the mass of Malaysians and Singaporeans to adopt.
The race for users
The challenge here, however, is winning the mindshare of local users to use Wootfood over the more well-known Foodspotting. After all, no one is going to repeat the process of adding dishes and restaurants for two similar apps.
Although late to the game, Wootfood is on par with Foodspotting. Luckily for Wootfood’s developers, Foodspotting doesn’t have a firm foothold among Malaysians yet. This means there’s still a chance for Wootfood to catch on, and with enough tweaks, enhancements and localized marketing efforts, it could still conquer the local food-sharing space yet.
To download the app, visit http://www.wootfood.com
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