Ubicompmobile | Main / Vindigo

Vindigo is a mobile app that gives the user comprehensive listings of restaurants & bars for a large number of cities. It also has information on movie showtimes, shopping, museums and even public bathrooms.

It debuted as a Palm OS app and was free. A few years ago, they switched over to a subscription-based model. The free version still had addresses, but the paid version had all sorts of bells and whistles like maps. At first I used the free version, but the new features were too tempting and I signed up for the subscription (it was only $25/yr for unlimited cities). I was travelling alot at the time too, so I figured it made sense. To date, it is the only fee-based on-line subscription I have ever had.

Vindigo knows where you are by having you enter the intersection you are nearest to. In a way, this is a fairly elegant solution for this service. In particular, it is nice because you can enter an intersection to which you are headed rather than the one you are currently located near. You can also save favorites like "home" that make entering your location easy.

I've also used it just for the map, particularly in other cities. When I was in Atlanta I used it to figure out where my car was parked. In Las Vegas I used it to find a place to buy clothing after US Airways lost my luggage.

Users can also enter information about restaurants and bars, both for their own use and/or ratings which are supposedly aggregated at HQ. There's also a checkbox to let vindigo know that a restaurant has closed. This little part doesn't seem to work very fast though, as every now and then a place will hang around in their db long after it has closed down.

here's a link: http://www.vindigo.com/