SXSW Where to Eat Map, a collaboration with Food+Tech Connect, Eat Well Guide, and Animal Welfare Approved

South by Southwest Interactive is a yearly conference in Austin, Texas that brings together engineers, entrepreneurs, and technology companies looking to share best practices, see emerging trends, and connect over the exciting developments happening around the world. Anthony, our CEO, is in Austin this weekend taking in the event, so if you’re there and want to connect you can ping him on twitter: @tonynicalo

Where to Eat in Austin

We got together with Food+Tech Connect, Eat Well Guide, and the Animal Welfare Approved to cultivate a list of stand-out food spots in town, and you might be surprised to hear it’s not all barbecue! Head to www.foodtree.com/sxsw to install the app on any mobile phone and to consult the list while you’re looking for your next meal.

The collaboration on the mobile app culminates tomorrow night during a special dinner event called Networked Food System. The gathering will welcome innovators, entrepreneurs, government officials and food systems experts to a delicious dinner and conversation about the direction our food system is headed. Our team tracked down the origin of all the food served during their meal and included that in the app well.

Below are some screenshots from the SXSW Where to Eat app and the menu being served tomorrow night at the NFS dinner.

If you’re in Austin this weekend make sure you drop by the Better Food Through Open Data Standards panel tomorrow at 12:30pm to hear Anthony and a panel of experts discuss how recipe sites, restaurant menu wranglers, open government developers, urban agronomists, provenance geeks and food policy activists are collaborating on an interoperable standard.

Tomorrow’s Farmers Market! #vanfarmers

Headed to Vancouver’s Trout Lake Farmers Market tomorrow? We know we are…nearly our entire team will be there (a few of us have to stay keep plugging along in the Treehouse, boo). If you are there, we’ll be tweeting and using the #VanFarmers hashtag to record the day.

Why the #VanFarmers hashtag?

Hashtags let everyone monitor a specific conversation…to pull it out of the stream of other things happening on Twitter.

We’ll be able to look at the conversation celebrating the season and its food producers quite easily if we’re using the hashtag to track it.

Following the hashtag is easy. You can head to twitter.com and search the hashtag to get a stream of tweets that include it.

There are also tools that make tracking a hashtag easy (most include other features for using social media), Hootsuite being the one of choice here at Foodtree. Other tools include deeper social media solutions like Seesmic or Tweetdeck, and lighter ‘listening’ tools like TweetChat or Monitter.

Mission #VanFarmers

If you want to join us in a little mission, we’re using an interesting new tool called Epic.io to track the #vanfarmers hashtag as a celebration of local food producers. To join us you just join our mission: Celebrate Vancouver’s Local Food Producers

Foodtree Mobile Web

You can also see from the screenshot above that we have a mobile layer on Foodtree that you’ll see if you visit http://foodtree.com from your smart phone. The mobile map represents food assets near you; farmers markets and restaurants near you.

We’ll be updating our mobile site throughout the season to deliver more information to you while you’re out moving around, but our attention is also on building a dedicated iPhone app, which you can sign up to beta test here.

Enjoy your weekend!

Get Involved In Your Food Community

I wanted to drop in and reach out to the community to explain some of the things we are going to do so that you guys can start participating right away.

We’re building foodtree to help everyone find food that makes them happy. We’re building it so that the people growing, raising, or catching our food and drink have a great way to share their hard work with citizens. Simply throwing up a website that acts like a phone book for farmers wouldn’t accomplish these goals very well, right?

via flickr.com

The first thing we’ve got for you is a bit of a photo movement. It’s simple, really. When you’re out and about shopping for food, wine, coffee, or anything you’ll be consuming, take two seconds to look at the labels surrounding you. Especially look at the ones you see on whole foods; fruit, vegetables, meats, and the rest.

Then pull out your phone and snap a photo.

After that, put it on Flickr and tag it with “foodtree”. If you’re using an App that let’s you geotag the photo (that means you can tag specific locational data to a photo – this kind of functionality is still a bit rare on most phones) we’d encourage you to do that too.

We’re going to do some pretty cool stuff with these photos. For now, it’s a way for anyone who likes the idea of knowing more about their food to immediately start participating in the effort to make finding that kind of information super easy.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, grab one here (they’re free, and a great way to manage your online photos). Did you know you can email your photos to Flickr?

And hey, while you’re at it, join the foodtree Flickr group!

– Derek

Get Involved With Foodtree.

As we approach our goal of launching a first version of foodtree over the next week or so, I wanted to drop in and reach out to the community to explain some of the things we are going to do so that you guys can start participating right away.

We’re building foodtree to help everyone find food that makes them happy. We’re building it so that the people growing, raising, or catching our food and drink have a great way to share their hard work with citizens. Simply throwing up a website that acts like a phone book for farmers wouldn’t accomplish these goals very well, right?

via flickr.com

The first thing we’ve got for you is a bit of a photo movement. It’s simple, really. When you’re out and about shopping for food, wine, coffee, or anything you’ll be consuming, take two seconds to look at the labels surrounding you. Especially look at the ones you see on whole foods; fruit, vegetables, meats, and the rest.

Then pull out your phone and snap a photo.

After that, put it on Flickr and tag it with “foodtree”. If you’re using an App that let’s you geotag the photo (that means you can tag specific locational data to a photo – this kind of functionality is still a bit rare on most phones) we’d encourage you to do that too.

We’re going to do some pretty cool stuff with these photos. For now, it’s a way for anyone who likes the idea of knowing more about their food to immediately start participating in the effort to make finding that kind of information super easy.

If you don’t have a Flickr account, grab one here (they’re free, and a great way to manage your online photos). Did you know you can email your photos to Flickr?

And hey, while you’re at it, join the foodtree Flickr group!