Gadgets Gizmos Gossip

No matter what type of business you run, if you have a presence online (and these days you should do) then you can benefit from taking advantage of social media and modern technology, including mobile applications and mobile browsing. As the infographic below demonstrates, restaurants are no exception when it comes to taking advantage of these modern promotional avenues.

‘Why Restaurants Are Moving Towards Social Media And Mobile Apps’

Infographic courtesy of Restaurant App Engines.

What Goes Best With the Meursault Les Narvaux 2007?

Never let it be said that gadget lovers aren’t sophisticated. There was a time when perhaps this was true – if you had the latest tech to hand, you were probably a neck-bearded old techie playing with cutting edge technology that was ultimately inaccessible to anyone without eyes as square as their social standing.  Nowadays, everyone who is anyone has a smartphone, maybe even a tablet. If a gadget is easy to use and it makes our life easier, why not bring it into your life? So Sommeliers everywhere are tooling up with the latest gadgetry, and the wine world looks a lot less stuffy. Wine Appreciation? Of course there’s an app for that. In fact, there’s several, and across multiple platforms too.

Hello Vino – Android and iOS

Currently the most popular and well reviewed wine app on the android store, Hello Vino is a comprehensive wine recommendation app that is also available for the iPhone app store. It allows you to select a wine based on the meal you intend to have, the occasion or recommends wines based on your taste preferences or from certain places of origin. It also allows you to find suitable foods for wines you’ve already bought!

Pair It – iOS

Never sure when to pair what wine with what food? Got a Fantastic Chardonnay Wine you want to share over dinner, but not sure what to put it with? Pair it is a $4.99 wine app available on the Apple App Store that will tell you not only how to pair each major grape type, but the sub-varietals too. With over 1000+ dishes and a course by course breakdown, it’s very comprehensive, even telling you irrelevant facts like how to pronounce each varietal. Shame it’s not multiplatform, mind!

R-Vintage Lookup – Android, Blackberry, iOS

The year a wine is produced can have a profound impact on both its value and its quality. R-Vintage Lookup is a handy app that advises you on the critical opinion and commercial value of a number of high profile wines, so you can make an informed decision about what you purchase, especially if you’re dealing with older wines. It’ll even tell you how long a white wine should be stored for before consumption (though I’ll give you that one for free – drink it after you buy it at the supermarket!) You can even get it on Blackberry devices (remember them?) as well as smartphones that people actually like (oooh, burn).

2010 has undoubtedly been the year of the app, with boastful iPhone owners declaring ‘there’s an app for that!’ whenever they get the chance. With hundreds of thousands of applications available via the App Store, there’s an incredible array of choice and variety of entertaining, functional or useful apps available to users; making it very difficult to choose a top three.

With that said however, we’ll give it a crack. Here are my personal top three iPhone apps of 2010:

1. Angry Birds

There was no way this fantastic little app wasn’t going to make it into my top 3; the most addictive, well designed and widely popular iPhone game of 2010, Angry Birds has seen millions of downloads and numerous updates and additions. As with most phenomenally addictive games, Angry Birds is an incredibly simple idea; destroy structures and green pigs with an array of destructive birds … and that’s about it. It’s fantastic.

2. Hipstamatic

Hipstamatic is an amazingly retro photography application, that turns your basic iPhone camera into an old-school analogue one. Hipstamatic features numerous different lenses and effects, which can be changed with the simple swipe of a finger. Add into that a myriad of different films and borders, social media integration and a flash, and you’ve got yourself one of the best photography apps of the year.

3. iMovie

It seemed inevitable that Apple would take their extremely popular and intuitive video editing software for the Mac and create an iPhone version; what they have come up with is the best portable and easy to use smartphone video editing software package available. Created specifically for the iPhone4, iMovie lets you record and edit HD videos as you take them, upload them directly to social media or send them to loved ones via wifi or 3G. If you haven’t tried it yet, give it a crack, it’s truly one of the best video editing packages you’ll ever use.

Written by Andrew, who works for a company specialising in digital signage and room control systems.