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“If Pandora and Yelp had a baby, it would be Nara,” said Tom Copeman, the CEO and co-founder of Nara, a company that offers web- and mobile-based applications for finding restaurants. Today, St. Louis joins 25 other cities in the second major release of Nara (the first release occurred last fall in cities like New York, Chicago, LA, and Seattle). Free, the Nara app will work as a “virtual agent,” according to Copeman, whom we spoke with by phone.
After you download the app and punch in a few preferences—“intimate,” “trendy,” “casual,” or “hipster,” for example—and then choose a price range, Nara will begin to make recommendations. You can also narrow your search by cuisine type (below)--even food trucks--or plug in a specific restaurant. The more you give a “thumbs up” or “down” to Nara’s recommendations, the better it gets to know your likes and dislikes, and the more restaurants it will recommend that fit your profile—what Copeman (right) calls your “digital DNA.”
Copeman, whose other successful entrepreneurial ventures include BodyGlide and lululemon athletica, explained that the concept behind Nara came to him when he traveled and “spent way too much time searching and planning” where to eat while the rest of his family was outside having fun. Committed to surrounding himself with “the best minds,” Copeman moved his family from southern California to Cambridge, MA, to be closer to MIT. Enter Dr. Nathan Wilson, Nara’s co-founder. With a Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, and an MA in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from Cornell, Wilson “conceived and built the Nara Neural Network,” a “complex algorithm [that] closely mirrors a human brain in terms of information synthesis and decision-making.”
Although we might not understand exactly how Nara works, we’ve been using it for the last week and have had fun testing the app to see if it gets us (it does) and were surprised to find a few places we’ve never heard of. We also noticed a couple of glitches—Nara thinks Monarch is still open—and brought them to Copeman’s attention. Eager to learn about how he can improve the Nara experience, the co-founder took notes on Nara’s mistakes and explained that with over a quarter million restaurants in the database, and the nature of the industry’s high turnover rate, they have their work cut out for them. One solution he posed will be to have local ambassadors who can help monitor Nara for accuracy as establishments open, close, and change.
One of Nara’s singular characteristics is its ability to apply your local user preferences to new cities you visit. After establishing your profile in St. Louis, for example, you might travel to San Francisco for the weekend, and Nara will help you find a great dinner spot (right) based on your St. Louis favorites. Moreover, the app is connected to OpenTable, so you can make reservations, or you can touch the “call” button to speak to someone at the restaurant. If you’d rather stay in, you can choose delivery since GrubHub will also soon be connected to Nara.
Copeman chose the name “Nara” for its dual Greek and Native American derivations: “happy” and “North Star,” respectively. The domain name, “me,” points toward the app’s individual personalization for each user. Nara’s main tag line reads “A life well found.” Some might perceive the idea of finding one’s life through a mobile app too ambitious; if you live to eat, however, you’ll understand how Nara will help you have your life and eat well too.
For more info on Nara, click here.
