Written By: John Moore
Restaurant-finder apps help users narrow down the dining choices in their home cities or further afield. Development company Nara Logics Inc., based in Cambridge, Mass., uses neural network technology to help users make restaurant decisions. The company’s Nara Mobile app, available for iOS and Android devices, offers recommendations in 50 U.S. and Canadian cities.
According to Nara Logics, the app learns a user’s restaurant preferences and creates a user-specific Digital DNA that guides the app’s dining suggestions. Here, Thomas Copeman, Nara Logics’ chief executive officer and founder, discusses his company’s development approach.
What were the key technical challenges in building Nara Mobile?
Thomas Copeman: We were in development mode for well over two years before we announced our first product commercially for mobile and for web. We knew we had to build a very complex system with which we could organize the mass of information that is out there on the web.
For each user, we are rendering in real time a personalized view of the web based on what the individual users tell us about themselves. You can appreciate the computational intensity behind that. It is very, very challenging.
Is the app native or based on HTML5?
T.C.: It’s based on HTML 5 and we’re using PhoneGap as the framework -- it was fast and could accommodate many platforms quickly. In the future, we will build more toward native.
Any plans for Windows Phone?
T.C.: We are keeping our eye on it. We are taking a wait-and-see approach at the moment.
You worked on the app for two years. Do you feel like you got the UI/UX right from the beginning? Do you plan on incorporating any changes based on early user feedback?
T.C.: I think that in the course of the couple of years we were developing the baseline for everything, we would have seen the UI/UX evolve in different phases. What you see today is certainly the result of a lot of feedback and testing and development. We are always looking at what our users are saying and what they want, but I think we are happy with a lot of the neural framework and layout of what we have today.
We think we have a great framework that can scale to other things in the future.
You can probably expect us to look at other consumer verticals in the lifestyle space: hotels and shopping, for example.
About the Author: John Moore has written about business and technology for more than 20 years. Moore’s articles have appeared in Baseline, CIO.com, Federal Computer Week, iHealthBeat, and TechTarget. Areas of focus include cloud computing, health information technology, systems integration, and virtualization.
