It’s late Sunday night. Naturally you’re avoiding homework and want to get something to eat. Yelp’s reviews are too long and you’re tired of eating at the same spot around the block. This is the dilemma Foodoo, a soon-to-be available mobile app, will try to solve.
Junior in Phi Kappa Psi Chris Drachkovitch, along with three of his friends, are currently producing the app aimed to ease the process of finding a good, local restraurant. “I’m hungry but I don’t know where to go. That’s such a simple problem that everyone has,” Drachkovitch said.
The idea came to Drachkovitch and his business partner and long time best friend, Andrew Landau in the summer when they were hanging out and trying to find a place to grab a bite, but could come up with no results.
When school was back in session, a rare and rather ironic opportunity came about. The UO Product Design school started the Colligan User Interface Design Challenge made for students to compete in teams to create any type of web related product or application that could “make mobile meaningful.”
Four months and a lot of hard work later, the team won the entire competition and pocketed $8,000 to make their app a reality.
Once the title was theirs, a computer science major and competitor in the competition, Jeremy Klein, hopped on board, along with his friend Max Lemkin. Now the team of four has a complete squad to perfect the app.
So, what makes Foodoo different from the competitor?
“Our app is coming at (finding a restaurant) from a new point of view,” Drachkovitch said. “That’s not based on ratings and more focused on crowed sourcing data and what people are liking around you.” Foodoo focuses on bringing great restaurants to users through discovery and sharing. Users are easily able to find near-by spots to eat on the app’s homepage based on location and crowd-sourced popularity. Friends can also send restaurant recommendations and share their favorite places with other users.
This means no long, drawn-out reviews that you don’t feel like reading. Foodoo finds the restaurant nearest to you and dictates whether or not it’s popular among people in your area.
“We don’t want to be a social network,” Drachkovitch said. ”We’re not a Snapchat.”
The team sees a bright future for Foodoo, but the bonding has also been a lot of fun, especially for Landau. “The experience has definitely been special between me and Chris. I have known him since I was two so it is very cool to be working on a project that could potentially lead to big opportunities,” he said.
As for Klein, he’s taken the most away from the process of creating the app. “When all five of us get together in a room and debate for hours, it’s really putting in the extra effort over the smallest details that shows me how passionate we all are about his app and seeing it succeed.”
Foodoo is a free app and set to hit the App Store in June of this year. Optimistic about the future of the app, Drachkovitch and his team are excited to see how far it will go and hopes that it will help people enjoy their eating experience.