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Social Food Journal Burpple Launches iPhone App, Just in Time to Photograph Your Lunch
Mixing photo-sharing with foodie fanaticism, the Singapore-based social food journal Burpple.com has launched its iPhone app after a few weeks in open beta. The app styles itself as a great way to remember, organize, and explore food moments with your friends, and encourages users to snap images of their ready-to-savor cuisine.
At the centre of the Burpple app is the journal element, for saving your foodie photos into customizable ‘boxes’ that you can assign a theme and name, such as ‘home-cooked.’ In addition, looking back through your archive of images in the app, it can recall where and when you ate that. Plus, the ‘reburp’ feature allows users to share their digital dining experience with friends, or even to sort of retweet what a friend had if you find their photo so amazing. Backing all that up is the more practical aspect of giving you trustworthy eating-out recommendations (or cook-at-home recipes) from your social media circle - making it a lot more direct than digging around in Foursquare or Google Places or something.
Despite mixing that kind of utility with an Instagram-esque funkiness, the startup has a lot of culinary competition to counter, especially from U.S.-based apps like Epicurious or Foodspotting. Perhaps early-stage buzz within smartphone-toting Singaporeans can give an initial boost in user numbers and stickiness to Burpple, allied with local knowledge of the food culture - such as with Burpple’s recent social marketing campaign that was oriented around kopi - aka: coffee - made in the Singapore style. But Burpple’s aim is international, and the startup says that its open beta saw folks in more than 39 countries start using the app.
Elisha Ong, co-founder of Burpple, says that the app is experiencing the kind of growth seen by Instagram and Pinterest shortly after their inceptions, and that the food journal app similarly “transcends cultures and geographical boundaries.”
The other co-founder, Dixon Chan, adds:
One in four smartphone users in the world take pictures of their meals everyday [1]. These photos that would potentially tell great gastronomical adventures are often left dormant in our smartphones or get drowned out on generic social media. Burpple aims to solve that.
On the road to this official launch, the startup has been incubated at the government-backed Plug-in@Blk 71, and then received a S$50,000 grant under the Spring young entrepreneurs scheme. Just last week, it was revealed that Burpple had formed a strategic partnership with its compatriot restaurant reservation service Chope.
Get the sweet-looking Burpple for iPhone app, now updated to v1.1 and ready to hit the streets, from the iTunes Store.
We can’t verify this stat. But if you change “meals” for “cats,” then the claim rings true for me. ↩
