We’ve been a bit slow to update this blog, but in case you missed it:

We’d been asked over and over again: “When will you have a mobile site?”

As with everything else on Eat.fi, we didn’t want to rush and make just any old thing. We wanted the mobile version to be screamingly fast, clean, and easy to use, while containing everything it needs yet not a thing too many. A haiku, or bouillon, if you will, of the big Eat.fi. This took time to figure out, but we hope it’s been worth the wait.

1. You can find the mobile site at http://m.eat.fi

Features:

• Search by restaurant name, location, or type
• Filter by type, price, lunch, and open/closed
• See instantly which places are open/serving lunch
• Reorder your search results by rating, distance, name, and most recently added
• See the restaurant’s basic information and reviews, and where it is on a map
• Find nearby alternatives

2. iPhone app:

The iPhone version of the mobile site lets you take advantage of GPS to locate restaurants near you as soon as you open the application. It’s currently the most popular free Lifestyle application in the Finnish App Store, and was the most popular free application in general for a while as well, with over 5000 downloads.

3. Nokia S60 Widget:

Our S60 Widget also makes use of the GPS in handsets that have S60 Web Runtime with Platform Services installed. It’s available in the Ovi store starting today!

Gaalaan mentiin torstaina ja hyvin meni! Paikalla oli kuulemma yli 700 henkeä kun Eat.fi voitti Grand One:ssa Paras Infodesign -palkinnon, ja sai myös kunniamaininnan Paras Startup -sarjassa.

Tuomareiden lausunnot:

Infodesign

Voittaja
Työ:	Eat.fi
Asiakas:	Kokumi
Tekijät:	2General PPL Media
Perustelut:	Palvelun ydin on loistavasti toteutettu kartta-mash-up, hyvin toimiva haku sekä filtteröintiominaisuudet. Palvelun sisältö on pakattu hyvin havainnollisiksi visuaalisiksi elementeiksi, joiden lisäksi kirjalliset arviot luovat arvoa muille käyttäjille. Palvelu on käytännöllinen ja lunastaa hyvin suunnitellulla ja toteutetulla käyttöliittymällätällaiselta sivustolta vaadittavat ominaisuudet. Navigointi on selkeä ja sivuston hakukoneoptimointi on riittävällä tasolla. Toimii myös näkörajoitteisille, muttei täysin ruudunlukijan varassa toimiville. Oikeasti käytännöllinen palvelu, jota on myös viihdyttävä käyttää. Tarpeellinen joka päivä!

Startup:

Kunniamaininta
Työ:	Eat.fi
Asiakas:	Kokumi
Tekijät:	2General PPL Media
Perustelut:	Startup nousi esiin esimerkillisen toteutuksen johdosta. Palvelu on tehty huolella ja erityisen esimerkillisesti loppukäyttäjien ehdoilla. Vaikka palvelu ei ole vielä saavuttanut suurta yleisöä siinä mittakaavassa kuin se voisi sen tehdä, sillä on kaikki mahdollisuudet nousta johtavaksi palveluksi omassa markkinassaan uskollisten heavy usereiden vauhdittamana.

Infodesign-kategoriassa finalistit olivat: Tripsay, MTV median Spotti.fi, Muxlim, Helsingin Sanomat tilaus- & asiakaspalvelu, Taloussanomat sivustouudistus, YLE Uutisten verkkopalvelu-uudistus, ja Suomen Pelastusarmeijan Säätiön Joulupata.

Startup-kategorian voitti Muxlim, ja kunniamaininnan sai myös Tripsay.

Kiitokset kaikille Eat.fi:n käyttäjille! Ilman teidän tukeanne, mielenkiintoanne ja jatkuvaa palautetta emme olisi päässeet näin pitkälle.

Eat.fi made it as a Grand One ‘09 finalist in two categories, Best Startup and Best Infodesign! We’re honored and delighted to have made it this far, and will be at the Gala tomorrow, so if you’re there and see us, say hi!

We’re delighted so many of you have taken the time to send us feedback. Here are a bunch of changes we’ve made recently in response to your requests:

1. Remember me! We agree, it was incredibly annoying to have to re-login all the time. We’ve added the “remember me” checkbox to the login form, so this shouldn’t be happening anymore.
2. Re-order search results. Another tiny yet powerful tool. There’s a drop-down menu at the top right of the search result page now which lets you reorder your search results. So for example, if you can’t remember the name of that new italian place, search for “ital” and reorder by “most recent”. Best japanese restaurant? Search for “japan” and reorder by “food quality”. Ta-dah!
3. Clearer map filters. People used to forget filters “on” and wonder why certain restaurants weren’t appearing on the map. If all filters are showing all possible results, the text on each one is now in brackets and greyed out, like so:
4. See all reviews on Eat.fi. We’ve added an “All of Eat.fi” tab to the “Reviews” section, so you can follow all reviews across the country at once, to help you find restaurants in other cities that you may want to bookmark in case you visit later.

And yes. We are working on the mobile site. There’s a functioning beta already, but it’s still missing a bunch of features that we’d like to add before you all start using it and wondering where those features are. If you really really want to start using the beta already, while being fully aware that it is very much still under construction, send us an email and we’ll send you the link.

We’ve finally found a solution. You see, there are only a handful (literally) of totally vegetarian restaurants in all of Finland, so making a category only for them seemed a bit of overkill. There are, however, many restaurants with a variety of good options for vegetarians, but there’s a lot of grey area between having a few leaves of iceberg lettuce in the salad bar and offering a range of vegetarian main courses that really satisfy.

No one person can really list all the places that fulfil this requirement. So we are leaving it up to everyone at once. Every restaurant page now has a voting box in the bottom right hand corner:

As long as more than 50% of the people voting are of the opinion that the restaurant is child friendly or vegetarian friendly, it remains in those categories on the main map page. As soon as the “Yes” votes drop below 50%, the restaurant is removed from the category. This takes into account the fact that restaurant menus, etc can and do change.

In the example to the left, three people believe the restaurant is child friendly, and three believe it is not vegetarian friendly.

We also added the child-friendly category because families with children, like vegetarians, often have a hard time going out to eat, and it is largely the staff ’s willingness and ability to accomodate the family’s needs (the pram, the screaming children, and so on) that makes all the difference. Again, this category is another grey area of opinion, so it is our hope that the combination of for and against votes will result in the greatest accuracy.

We may add other categories later, if demand is high enough. At the moment, we want to be very careful about which categories we add, because each one adds more clutter and makes the site more complicated. As a result we have also set up a category-voting forum, where you can add your wishes for the future.

Some updates we forgot to mention:

1. If you are a registered user, you can now vote on the quality of individual reviews directly on the “recent reviews” page, instead of just on an individual restaurant page. If a review gets over -3 in votes, the system deletes it. We will probably increase this limit later, once voting becomes more frequent.

2. Reviews older than two years are no longer counted in the averages, but remain visible(though greyed-out).

3. We reorganized the city menu to reflect the increase in new cities once we had so many they no longer fit. This included adding a city search field and dividing cities between the largest ones and the rest.

In some ways it’s an arbitrary milestone, but this past week we got over 10,000 unique visitors according to Google Analytics, which is cause for a bit of celebration. We’re also #54 on Oindex, a site which compares and visitor amounts of sites all over Finland. We’re happy to report that it’s not just a question of a sudden spike. We’ve been seeing nice and steady organic growth all along…

Oindex Eat.fi records

…which bodes very well for the future. A big thank you goes out to all of you enthusiastic users who have been spreading the word! You are very much appreciated.

We did another round of various updates, but this one deserves a special hilight.

Partial search: It’s easy to miss, but it’s a big, big deal and was quite tricky to get working right with the amount of data we’ve got. Now you can search for just parts of restaurant names and descriptions. We’re talking about this field, found at the top right of every page:

Previously if you were looking for, say “Villetta” you would have to type:

Now you can just type a part of the word, like so:

You’ll find both “Villetta” and “Villa Maria” that way. Exciting, no? You can also type “ital” if you’re looking for “italian” or “italy”. It’ll find both. Powerful stuff.

Hot pro tip: Type the name of a city into the search field to go directly there!

We’ve been busy! You may have noticed that the site is now in Swedish as well (choose “SV” in the top left corner), and the wiki-like editing tools have been updated and clarified thanks to lots of useful feedback from users and the attendees of BarCamp Helsinki. (Thanks, guys!)

If you are a Swedish speaker and notice any translations that seem silly, please let us know.

Wiki-tools: Instead of the little menu shown in the last post, we’ve added little “Add missing information” markers to restaurants with no information, and then tucked all the rest of the editing tools under a prominent “Information missing or wrong” link on each restaurant page:

This should make the tools easier to find, and also used more often. The results speak for themselves–we’ve had far more updates to information since we made these changes.

Slush Helsinki was an event for internet startups last Monday at Korjaamo organized by ArcticStartup, which is looking to help promote internet entrepreneurship in the North. Other organizers were Zipipop and Floobs. We intended to post about this before the event, but unfortunately forgot to while we were preparing for our participation in it! (We also forgot to take photos of our demo space there…arg!) In any case, we did attend and demo the site, which was fun and well worth it. It was really nice to meet many of you users and hear your feedback in person, as well as to share experiences and information with the other people in the industry. Let’s do it again next year!

You may have noticed that we now list Tampere and Porvoo in addition to Helsinki in our “choose city” list, and may be wondering, “Why Porvoo? Why not some other big city?” There is a method to our madness. Since we introduced our wiki-like editing tools, any registered user is able to add/edit restaurant information.

This means that if you live in an area that doesn’t have much information on Eat.fi yet, but wish it would get more visibility, you can do something about it. If we notice a lot of activity in a certain city, with most of the information (opening times, categories, and contact information for restaurants) filled in, we’ll display that city on the front page. Since Porvoo now has a lot of information on it, we gave Porvoo some of that front-page love.

What wiki-like editing tools?

On every restaurant page, at the top right, there is now a link that says “Update information.”

If you’re logged in as a registered user, you’ll find all the tools you need to change opening times, contact info, etc. in this menu. In order to prevent vandalism, we log all user changes in a public “history” log, which can also be found at the bottom of this menu.

If a restaurant owner has “claimed” their restaurant, ie has logged in and indicated that he or she is in charge of this restaurant’s information from now on, you won’t see these tools, but rather a message field which will allow you to report wrong information directly to the restaurant owner.

We believe that by giving users and owners direct and free access to restaurant information, the site will stay far more accurate than if we tried to centralize upkeep. No one knows better(or sooner) than the restaurant owners or local customers themselves when a restaurant is undergoing renovations, or has changed its opening times. Try it out and let us know what you think!