Napa Valley, long associated with great wine and great food, kicks off its first ever Napa Valley Film Festival (November 9 – 13) tomorrow to add movies to its list of great offerings.

To celebrate the occasion, the Napa Valley Film Festival collaborated with top Napa Valley restaurants to create an extensive Movies to Dine For contest guide featuring dishes the restaurants created in honour of the inaugural NVFF - all inspired by their favourite movies. Some participating restaurants you may recognize include Morimoto Napa, Farmstead, Bardessono and many more. To see a full of list of who's participating, visit NVFF's Foodspotting guide.

What's even better? NVFF is giving away 3 special awards and amazing prizes for contest winners. Just follow the guide and spot the items inside.

MASTER FOODSPOTTER
- Awarded to the entrant who spots the most menu items during the 5-day festival.
- Winner will receive two 2012 Festival Passes, a gift certificate to legendary Napa Valley restaurant, a Tassimo Innovative Home Brewing System, and the opportunity to participate in the 2012 Foodspotting Jury.

CROWD FAVORITE
- Awarded to the restaurant whose dish is spotted the most during the festival.
- Winning restaurant will receive a pack of six 2012 Day Passes, plus a special bottle.

BEST MENU ITEM
- Awarded to the chef with the best presentation as voted on by the Foodspotting Jury.
- Winning chef will receive a large format bottle of wine.

The official hashtag is #NVFFnom, so get ready for some great films, good eats and be sure to tag up your sightings and tweets!

Photos by Foodspotters: Eric Rodenbeck at Farmstead; Snorider at Bardessono; Randy F. at Morimoto Napa; and Jona Mendoza Fabiani at Kitchen Door.

Foodspotting was recently invited to the lovely island of Oahu, Hawaii to attend the first Hawaii Food & Wine Festival, courtesy of the Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau.

The goal? To experience Oahu's rich food culture. It was a tough task, but someone had to do it! To prep for the trip, we asked our awesome community in Hawaii for the can't miss dishes - and, of course, we hosted an eatup. We were graciously hosted by Ed Kenney at Town Kaimuki where brand new tables were unboxed to accommodate our group of 25 foodspotters outdoors. We laughed, we ate, we spotted. And it was not until a few days later we learned that the hospitality and warmth Ed Kenney showed us during the eatup, he also extended to making good food happen in Hawaii's local food community.

Later that week, we tagged along with a group of visiting press and got a tour of MA'O Organic Farms, where Ed Kenney was the very first restaurateur to support them when they opened up for business 10 years earlier. Now the farm, run almost entirely by college interns, provides organic produce to over a dozen local restaurants and grocery stores all over the island, sends roughly 40 kids to college and earns half a million in sales each year.

The piece de resistance of the week's trip was the Hawaii Food & Wine Festival and understandably so. The poolside soiree, "Streets of Asia: Morimoto and Friends at the Modern Waikiki," was set against a glowing sunset by a pool and marked the one year anniversary of Morimoto Waikiki. It was a great cast of chefs, including San Francisco favourites Charles Phan of The Slanted Door and Mourad Lahlou of Aziza.

Needless to say, it was a fabulous time. While in Hawaii, we learned that "aloha" means love - and it's so interesting that Hawaii folk greet and bid farewell with the word aloha. As cheesy as this sounds, a good community can't exist without aloha. Really thankful that we have such an amazing community in Hawaii and got to share in the love that happens within the local food community in Oahu.

Special thanks to Hawaii Visitors and Conventions Bureau and the organisers of Hawaii Food & Wine Festival for a very wonderful event.

Above photos by Foodspotters Ed Morita and Rae Oda.

If you haven't already heard, Foodspotting is hanging out at New York Comic Con this weekend! We partnered up with our friends at A Taste of Comics, made up of Ron Richards of iFanboy, C.B. Cebulski of Marvel Comics, Filip Sablik of Top Cow and Russ Cundiff of Divide Pictures, to bring you their top recommendations for NYCC through an exclusive Foodspotting guide.

To celebrate our combined love for all things food and comics, we worked with superstar artist, Cliff Chiang, to create a limited edition button (both pictured above on the left).

Want this button? Just come by Foodspotting's table, located by the Autographing Area in Javitz North, and show us you're downloading our app. For extra credit and a Foodspotting t-shirt, spot something within the A Taste of Comics guide or simply tweet/Facebook about your love for Foodspotting + A Taste of Comics.

And if you're around at 2:45pm today, go see our own Amy Cao speaking with Wylie Dufrense of WD50, C.B. of Marvel and others on the Food & Comics panel. See you there!

Incredible photography by super Foodspotter Meng, who is so generously helping us at NYCC: about.me/missmeng.

What's better than discovering amazing new dishes? Discovering amazing dishes for 50% or even 100% off! Now you can thanks to our friends at Scoutmob who we've teamed up with to surface quality offers you can redeem on the spot - right in the Foodspotting stream!

HOW IT WORKS

Starting today, when you launch the Foodspotting iPhone app in one of 13 major U.S. cities, you'll see the Scoutmob deals nearest you. You can redeem these deals by simply tapping on the deal and showing the confirmation screen on your iPhone - no credit card, registration or in-app purchase needed! On an Android phone? Stay tuned, as we're working with Scoutmob to bring this feature to our Android app as well.

We've had a crush on Scoutmob for a while - we love their instant, seamless redemption flow, and we've discovered so many great foods thanks to them, like the Fried Oyster Kimchee Burrito @ HRD that we enjoyed last week! Because of this, we can't imagine a better aligned launch partner for instream offers on Foodspotting. What sets Scoutmob apart in the deal space is how it exclusively works with locally-owned businesses, supporting great neighborhood cafes, restaurants, bars and bistros - staying away from national chains or tourist meccas. There are nearly 500 various deals available through Scoutmob at any given time.

We've loved working with Scoutmob's team to make this possible, and as their first distribution partner, we're excited to enable Scoutmob and its business partners to reach a targeted audience of hungry foodseekers!

CELEBRATE WITH US!

What better way to celebrate this happy occasion than by eating? Tomorrow, please join us at one of the four eat-ups we're co-hosting with ScoutMob in San Francisco, Atlanta, New York City and DC. Each of these venues have active Scoutmob deals so that you can test out the Foodspotting + Scoutmob integration right on the spot.

Please RSVP to attend. Just a heads up – we're giving away a limited number of t-shirts so come early to grab yours!

To connect the four events nationwide, we'll have a Twitter contest to win a $50 gift card to the local eatery of your choice, courtesy of Scoutmob. Just fire up the Foodspotting app to see local restaurant deals, and tweet about it with hashtag #mobspotting to be entered to win.

HUNGRY YET?

Launch the Foodspotting iPhone app, and start discovering even more new and interesting foods wherever you are!

This week, we're throwing our second annual bicoastal shrimp and wine fest with our good friends Wok+Wine. As you can see, our San Francisco party was a blast! Thanks to Oriel Wines for providing delicious wine and keeping it flowing while professional wok-wrangler Peter fried 50 pounds of sizzling and perfectly seasoned shrimp. We ate with our hands, made new friends and got to see old ones. Thanks to everyone who came! We're still a little dazed from enjoying the unforgettable feast.

Have friends in New York? Tell them to come to the New York leg of our bicoastal celebration happening tomorrow night. Click here for tickets.

Photos courtesy of our own Chris Connolly. For more, check out Wok+Wine on Facebook.

Our friends at AskMen.com, the world’s biggest lifestyle site for men, love helping guys (and gals) find the best things out there. Now they're looking for your help in their hunt for the most macho meal that has ever existed. Do T-bones induce testosterone? Will a bacon burger explosion put hair on your chest? Is there such a thing as a manly salad? You tell them. Simply snap a photo and add it to the Alpha Meal Contest Guide.

The best submissions will be featured on AskMen in a Top 10: Manly Meals slideshow - that's 17 million AskMen readers who will see your pick! One grand prize winner from the top 10 will also be awarded the ultimate mini-fridge from Micro Fridge – actually shaped like a tool box! – for all those manly leftovers, plus some AskMen schwag.

Go out and add your sightings of the manliest meal you know to the guide! Contest ends on September 5, 2011. Submit as many manly entries as you'd like.

Yes, these two photos were taken with a point-and-shoot camera. And I did not have to adjust any settings, f-stops, shutter speeds, nada. And yes, it was just as easy as hitting a button!

Behold, the Sony Cybershot WX-9. A few months back, Sony invited us down to San Diego and armed us with this amazing camera with a special Gourmet setting, helping make it easier to photograph foods. Who better to call to the case than us Foodspotters, right? Since then, we've been playing around with the cameras and have continued to be impressed and re-impressed with the quality of the photos. You can see for yourself above. I will also disclaim that I did not adjust any colours for lighting in the shots.

We think the camera is so great that we want to give away one of these bad boys to a lucky foodspotter, courtesy of our friends at Sony! All you have to do is leave a comment below or share the following on Twitter or Foodspotting's Facebook page:

I want to win #fsgiveaway because (reason here). Then include a link to your Foodspotting profile.

One winner will be picked by our team based on answer creativity and active participation on Foodspotting. Three runners-uppers will receive $25 Sony gift cards. Deadline to participate is Monday, July 25 at midnight PT. We'll make our selection next week.

The Foodspotting team has always known that our three co-founders, Alexa, Ted and Soraya are awesome. Of course, we also knew maybe we're just a little biased. This month, the trio is featured in Inc. Magazine's 30 Under 30, confirming that they are indeed spectacular - and not just to us lucky few who get to work with them.

Read about the thirty extraordinary young entrepreneurs on Inc.com and pick up the magazine at your local newsstand. Big congratulations to our co-founders and friends!

WATCH this fun video of our founders who tell us about Foodspotting in their own words...