Our team was thrilled to be featured on the Today Show this morning during a segment about awesome young women who start their own businesses. Hear our CEO Alexa talk about our app and see Foodspotting in action at our office in San Francisco!

Hint: Fast forward to 2:05 for Foodspotting and see our previous feature on the Today Show about must-have travel apps.

Download the new iPhone & Android apps  |  Download High Res Screenshot

When we launched Foodspotting in January 2010, Ted and I looked forward to the day it could be a picture menu for every restaurant. One million sightings and two million downloads later, we've learned a lot about what a smart, personal, social menu could look like. We took everything we learned and, today, after many late nights for Team Foodspotting, we're proud to unveil Foodspotting 3 for iPhone and Android, as well as the debut of our Blackberry app soon this week! (Our Windows Phone app was built with these ideas in mind from the start.)

Beyond giving the app a complete visual makeover, we're introducing a Pandora-like interface for discovering and rating dishes around you. You can now:

• Bookmark dishes you want to try ("Want it")
• Hide dishes you don’t want ("Hide it")
• Recommend dishes you love with one tap ("Loved it" — the new Nom)
• Keep tabs on dishes you've tried but didn't necessarily love ("Tried it")
• Find out what friends recommend wherever you go with the Filter Wheel & Activity Feed
• See partners’ badge of approval on dishes they recommend, including our newest partners: Travel + Leisure, visitPA and champion eater Takeru Kobayashi.

WHAT OUR TEAM LOVES ABOUT THE NEW DESIGN

1. It's like Pandora for food: We've been happily tailoring Foodspotting to our tastes by bookmarking dishes we Want and Hiding dishes we don't want. Our resident vegetarians have been hiding coworkers' offal sightings, and I've been wanting every truffle dish in sight.
2. It's like a personalized picture menu: Our team has been sharing dish recommendations without saying a word by simply "Loving" things on Foodspotting. Now when I walk into a restaurant, I can see what my coworkers and friends loved there, whether it was yesterday or years ago. I can also see what I already tried so I never have to order the same Bubble Tea twice, unless I want to, of course!
3. It's like food radar: We've been navigating foods near and far using the new filter wheel and map, and we've enjoyed stumbling upon dishes we Wanted weeks ago, dishes we Spotted years ago and new dishes that have popped up in our neighborhood in the past few days, like this Truffle Mushroom Soup @ Marlowe.

THE NEW FOODSPOTTING LOGO

You might notice another big change for Foodspotting: Our new logo! (The one on the right.) Contrary to what our old logo implied, Foodspotting is not just for people who take pictures of their food. In fact, over 90% of our otherwise active users have never taken a food photo. To better capture what Foodspotting means for a broader audience—discovering amazing dishes wherever you go—we decided it was time to move away from using “I Photograph Food” as our primary identity. After much thought and many explorations, we finally fell in love with this simple mark that incorporates everything we want to communicate:

• It's an eye... for seeing great things around you.
• It's a dish... because dishes make us different!
• It's a cookie with a bite taken out... yum.
• It's a lens... for revealing delicious foods you wouldn't have known about otherwise.
• We've also heard people say it's a smiling mouth, a distant cousin of Pac Man and a cat's head tilted to one side… all perfectly acceptable interpretations to me!

For our beloved food photo takers who power Foodspotting, "I Photograph Food" is not going away! We've refreshed our line of t-shirts and schwag so you can still wear it proudly.

CELEBRATE WITH US!

We’ve been celebrating Foodspotting’s second birthday all January and are excited about how far the app has come. We hope you'll celebrate with us by downloading the new app and finding something amazing to eat near you!

Video directed by Chris Lenox Smith with original music by Huma-Huma

While sushi may seem simple, these pure morsels from the sea have an undeniable appeal. Though it's "just fish" to some, sushi enthusiasts could tell you that each bite is an adventure or like feeling a story unfold. This is where JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI comes in...

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI is the story of 85 year-old Jiro Ono, considered by many to be the world’s greatest sushi chef. He is the proprietor of Sukiyabashi Jiro, a 10-seat, sushi-only restaurant inauspiciously located in a Tokyo subway station. Despite its humble appearances, it is the first restaurant of its kind to be awarded a prestigious 3 star Michelin review, and sushi lovers from around the globe make repeated pilgrimage... At the heart of this story is Jiro’s relationship with his eldest son Yoshikazu, the worthy heir to Jiro’s legacy, who is unable to live up to his full potential in his father’s shadow.

We're thrilled to partner with Magnolia Pictures to give away passes to special advance screenings of JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI in the following cities:

Los Angeles February 8 at The Landmark
New York City February 13 at Walter Reade Theater
San Francisco February 16 at Lumiere Theatre

For a chance to win, simply download and launch the Foodspotting app from now until February 4th to stumble on a Golden Ticket containing a pair of passes to the LA show (SF and NY shows will be going into the Golden Ticket stream after that). Good luck and, as always, happy Foodspotting!

NOTE Winners will need to arrive early for seats as all screenings are overbooked.

On the the last day of our whirlwind Ireland trip, Chris and I found ourselves back in Dublin after a tire on our rented car blew out en route to Kilkenny. Hungry and worn out from multiple car-related mishaps, we ventured out looking for dinner with our trusty Foodspotting app leading the way!

See our favorite dishes from this trip in Foodspotting with a Local Focus in Ireland.

Many thanks to Failte Ireland and Good Food Ireland for organizing our four-day culinary tour, and for going above and beyond to rescue us when we had car troubles!

This week, we're on a NEXTPEDITION thanks to American Express Travel. Our first stop was New Orleans where we enjoyed Cajun and Creole specialties like seafood gumbo, turtle soup and beignets smothered in powdered sugar. After three days of wandering the French Quarter, sampling pralines, seeing rare white alligators at the Audubon Zoo and basking in the beautiful fall weather, we learned about our second destination yesterday - San Francisco!

We're looking forward to the Snacker's Delight tour of SF tomorrow (organized by the NEXTPEDITION team), but decided to surprise the Foodspotting team and work from the office today. Check out our quick video of today's unexpected visit and to see our sweet digs in San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood.

At Foodspotting we stand by the phrase "A picture says a thousand words," which is why our site and apps show you what's good around you rather than sharing wordy reviews. Since seeing is believing, we're excited to introduce our new project – a Foodspotting video series with yours truly!

In our first episode of Foodspotting with Amy we go searching for cookies using the Foodspotting app in NYC. Joining me was foodspotter and pro photographer Clay Williams. Watch the video to the end to learn about our Cookiepedia giveaway! To enter, spot cookies on Foodspotting and tag your sightings with #cookiespotting. Contest ends Wednesday, September 21st. Winners will be randomly chosen from eligible entries. US and Canada only.

We're just getting started, so let us know what dishes you want to see next.

Since we launched Foodspotting a year and a half ago (in January 2010), our focus has been on making it useful in the moment and the easiest way to find great dishes wherever you go. With over 1 million downloads, we're quickly becoming the app people turn to when they're looking for something to eat.

But we started to notice that people weren't just launching Foodspotting when they were hungry (though we're pretty good at making people hungry!), they were browsing and "wanting" dishes all around the world, all throughout the day. And we quickly realized that one of the best ways to discover interesting foods is to follow the friends and experts you trust.

You've been able to follow your favorite people, places and dishes from the website for a while. Now, we're bringing these long-awaited social features to our iPhone and Android apps, just in time to celebrate our one millionth download!

WHAT'S NEW

Download the latest update and check out the new Follow tab to:

NOT SURE WHO TO FOLLOW?

GO FIND SOMETHING GREAT

We hope you'll discover something great using the new apps, and we'd love to hear about the best dishes you come across through Foodspotting. We also have a gorgeous new homepage that you should check out, and don't forget to watch our latest video featuring our users and our teams' favorite finds.

Last but not least, we're beta testing our BlackBerry app – join the list here if you'd like to help us test – and have some exciting things in the works for Windows Phone too. We're working with external partners to develop both so bear with us while we work on bringing Foodspotting to you!

TELL US

What's the best thing YOU'VE found through Foodspotting? Leave your reply below.

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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...