Ever heard of OpenSnap?

Nowadays, doing a “selfie” has become as common as taking photos of the food served before eating whether in a restaurant or at home. Accept it or not, modern technology has made eating a shared experience worldwide.

It is in this set-up where OpenRice.com and OpenSnap thrive. Open what? Well, unless you’ve been obsessed with the various Napolists, chances are, you haven’t heard yet of them.

Just recently, we tried OpenRice.com, an online dining guide. We learned that it’s written by our local food lovers and celebrities as well, with a comprehensive restaurant search engine and a platform for users to write reviews on restaurants they have visited. Sounds familiar?

In the Philippines, OpenRice.com features more than 80,000 dining places, which are categorized by cuisine, district and price range to allow users to quickly and easily find their favorite restaurants.

“OpenRice.com was established in Hong Kong in 1999 and since then has extended its services to countries across Southeast Asia like China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand,” says Jenna Sung, the Hong Kong-based OpenRice product manager, in a meeting with the local press.
Sung explains that users can learn more by going through each restaurant’s gourmet reviews and photos, and even bookmark their favorite ones. It can be found in Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and Instagram.

Now let’s say if you’re craving for the best bulalo, pork steak, salad, pasta, sushi or vegetarian cuisine within two kilometers from where you’re seated, you’d want to ask about the price, the amount of servings and all the basic stuff. All you got is your smart phone or tablet.

Here enters OpenSnap, a brand-new mobile app.

“OpenSnap is a revolutionary mobile application for iOS and Android smartphone and tablet users where you can find popular restaurant spots through food photos uploaded by friends and families. It is the first and unique food photo app in the Philippines and Asia that allows users to create a personalized food albums and share their dining experience with friends and families wherever and whenever,” says Sung.

Connected to the OpenRice database, she explains, OpenSnap allows users to locate more than one million restaurants not only in the Philippines but in Asia, share dining experience and identify OpenRice members, as well as Facebook friends and celebrities.

“It allows Filipinos to enjoy local and worldwide cuisine on their fingertips with the support of advanced iCloud technology,” she adds.

Enril Magdato, country manager, explains how OpenSnap offers a user-friendly and convenient approach to creating one’s own food photo albums, photo sharing, hashtag locations, photo filtering and use of stickers in photos.

“OpenSnap users can also tag their friends in their photo uploads, as well as share the information with their personal social networking platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Weibo,” he says.

The major features of OpenSnap include using food photos to search for nearby restaurants. This helps consumers to save time to locate alternate dining locations.

Another is to create and share personalized restaurant albums because OpenSnap provides users with personalized restaurant albums so that they can easily share their dining experience wherever and whenever. Users could check the restaurant details by clicking the food photos, with more supplementary information for a perfect dining experience.

One could browse more than one million restaurants in Asia because OpenSnap has an advanced search function to reach out dining photos and restaurant information of other Asian regions such as China, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Hong Kong.

Photos come with a wealth of information because each food photo provides the user with restaurant address, map, contact details, reviews and comments.