In a big city like New York, phone apps can help residents and tourists alike to navigate the city. At Untapped, we’ve rounded up the nine apps we like best (as of today) posting this from Social Media Week in NYC at Big Fuel.
Use these apps to find an awesome food truck, know where NOT to eat, figure out how to get home with weekend subway delays, even find another player for tonight’s game. Many of the following applications were also developed by local companies.
Tweat.it: New York City is now home to several pop-up food trucks that serve many foods including sushi rolls, tacos and freshly made ice cream. Tweat.it helps the public find an alternative to the sit-down restaurant by finding the truck closest to them.
Waze: Waze is a local driving community-based traffic and navigation app. With Waze, drivers share real-time information about traffic, construction, and even police and speed trap locations. Even if you don’t drive, we think the Waze map interface is more fun and intuitive than Google Maps.
Foodspotting: In a city as dense as New York, anything that helps you find the perfect food you’re craving is great in our book. Foodspotting allows users to find and recommend dishes rather than restaurants, so you can be on a street corner craving that Sunday Hangover Eggs Benedict cure and open up your app to see what other users “spotted” in the area rather than clicking through restaurant menus.
Zaarly: We’ve probably heard of thousands times how hard Craigslist is to use. Enter Zaarly, a new mobile, location-based marketplace to buy & sell goods, services, and experiences. The app is insanely useful for anything from borrowing a bike from a neighbor to finding the right person to be a dealer for your poker night.
Greplin: Grepli allows you to store important online information in one place, which may include taxi numbers, grocery delivery services and dog-walker numbers. Bloomberg Business Week and Time.com all recognized this application for being just so damn useful.
My City Way: My City Way, backed by BMW i, is a category-based app that allows you to locate services around you like finding a Chinese restaurant and locating the nearest wireless hotspot. The app does not stop in New York. It’s available in 70 cities across the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia and Australia.
NYC Media: With hundreds of videos at your fingertips, you will never be bored while awaiting a food order. NYC Media’s application compiles information on food, news, calendars and life in NYC. A neat feature is the GPS mapping tool which allows the user to watch video related a specific location in the city.
Roadify: Roadify, along with DontEat.At, won the 2011 NYC Big Apps 2.0 Competition and was dubbed “genius” by TechCrunch. The application consolidates information from DOT, MTA and citizens on the street regarding local travel information. The app allows people give and receive information about what is happening on the ground.
DontEat.at: DontEat.At is a Foursquare-based application created by Max Stroller, a student at New York University. It sends users an SMS message after “checking into” a food place. The shared message informs the user as to whether the establishment may be at risk of being closed due to health violations.
