The first is the Jewish Hospital app. The app’s functions are:
- Find the closest Jewish ER
- Finding a physician near you and even requesting an appointment
- Registering for events
- Keeping track of the latest JHSMH news
- Receiving interesting health news and tips
- Monitoring your food intake with a calorie tracker and food diary
- Determining if you are in a healthy weight range with a BMI calculator

Most of that seems pretty cool and useful to me. Here’s a video that goes into more detail about what the app does.

The Kentucky Derby Festival has also released an app. Oddly enough though I can’t find any info about it on the KDF site. Well, there’s a link to the iTunes download but not description of what the app actually does. However according to the Courier “The app allows a user to locate and map more than 60 events and provides information about days and times.”

That seems pretty useful as well if you want to stay on top of Derby Festival events and particularly when you’re out and want to know “hey, any cool Derby Fest events going on near hear tonight?” Location based notifications FTW.

I’ve downloaded both apps and will try to update you on how they’re working out for me.

It has notifications about upcoming events, reviews and interviews with local boutiques and salons, musings about designers, and always implores people to step up their game when it comes to style.

This is an area that I have absolutely no knowledge in. But Kevin seems passionate about the subject manner and our city. That’s a winning combination and I’m sure more than a few of you know more about and are interested in the topic.

Think of foursquare as an “urban mix tape.” We’ll help you make lists of your favorite things to do and let you share them with friends. Think beyond your standard review – we’re looking less for “The food here is top notch” and more for “Go to Dumont Burger and try the most amazing Mac and Cheese ever.” Foursquare will keep track of the things you’ve done, help you create To-Do lists and even suggest new experiences to seek out.

As you check-in around the city, you’ll start finding tips that other users have left behind. After checking-in at a restaurant, it’s not uncommon to unlock a tip suggesting the best thing on the menu. Checking-in at a bar will often offer advice on what your next stop should be. Every tip you create is discoverable by other users just by checking-in.

I don’t think anyone was more excited than I was when foursquare finally made it’s way to Louisville a while back. I don’t know why I was so excited. All my L.A. and Austin people were using it, and I’d see their updates and their newly crowned status as mayors on Twitter and it just seemed fun. And it was, at first. At one time I was the foursquare mayor of Highland Coffee, The Irish Rover, a Heine Brothers, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Zaytun. But here’s the thing, I’m sort of, kind of, a little bit already tapped in to cool places in the city. I haven’t really discovered anything new via foursquare yet. Some of the tips have been good but a lot of them aren’t applicable to me (for example any time that includes bacon or beer).

What I really want out of foursquare, both because I’m selfish and because I think it’s great to reward loyalty, is to start seeing venues offer special deals to the foursquare mayor of their business or after someone’s 10th checkin or for leaving a good, useful tip, etc. Foursquare is a essentially a game and while it was fun playing for a while just for the sake of playing most good games have some measure of winning. My definition of “winning” in foursquare would be a free bowl of lentil soup at Zaytun for being the mayor, an upgrade from a medium latte to a large at Highland Coffee for my 15th checkin in the past two months, a free smoothie from the juice bar for whoever is dedicated enough to be mayor at the gym, you get the idea.

I think this would be good for businesses because we’re a competitive lot and if there’s a prize involved (and it doesn’t even matter how small the prize is) I’m in it to win. I’ve lost my mayorship of everywhere but Zaytun I think and I’m not currently even remotely compelled to try to win them back. As of right now I can only find two Louisville businesses offering foursquare related deals. The first is Carraba’s Italian Grill, a chain that is offering the same deal in every city they’ve got a location. The second is the Bourbon Street Cafe at Brown-Forman. (And good on you Brown-Forman for getting in the game early!)

So consider this a plea from me (and the rest of the playful and competitively minded digerati in Louisville) for local businesses to get in on the foursquare game. foursquare has even put together some ideas for businesses. I’d love to get enough foursquare specials going that I could add a running list of foursquare specials to Consuming Louisville.

Thank you for your support.

“By submitting an entry and entering the contest, you grant Trazzler and Greater Louisville Community Branding Project and its member organizations a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free right to publish and distribute your text and photo entry for their promotional purposes in print and digital materials.”

But maybe you aren’t like me and don’t have any issue with those terms. Maybe the prizes are good enough to make it absolutely worth entering to you. So with that in mind, without passing go, without collecting $200 let me give you the information, straight from the horse’s mouth as they say, on the Trazzler Louisville Writing Contest.

Trazzler.com recently launched the Louisville Writing Contest, a travel writing contest for residents, visitors, and friends of Louisville, Kentucky, to submit short trips (between 65-140 words) about their favorite restaurants, bars, public art, parks, events, festivals, and more in Louisville: http://www.trazzler.com/contests/louisville.

The contest, sponsored by the Louisville Convention and Visitors Bureau, runs until May 15, 2010. The grand prize, decided by popular vote, is a two-night stay at the 21c Museum Hotel, a $200 gift card to any of the 40+ Louisville Originals Restaurants, and 2 tickets to the Actor’s Theatre. Trazzler will also award a freelance writing contract to contest entrants or Louisville local experts.

The Pass is described as “a four piece electro-pop band with a strong love for 80′s synth music.” Heaven help me if B hears their self-produced five track EP because she’s going to put it on repeat and go nuts. That EP is now available on iTunes by the way. The band is working on a full length debut album but in the meantime they’re using the EP (called Colors) as a sort of “Hello World!” introduction. Knowing that first impressions matter they’re not coming to the party empty handed. Nope, they’re giving away two tracks off Colors so you can try before you buy.

(right click and Save As)
Cross Walk Stereo
Colors

Google is planning to launch an experiment that we hope will make Internet access better and faster for everyone. We plan to test ultra-high speed broadband networks in one or more trial locations across the country. Our networks will deliver Internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most Americans have access to today, over 1 gigabit per second, fiber-to-the-home connections. We’ll offer service at a competitive price to at least 50,000 and potentially up to 500,000 people.

Friends, that’s just a little bit of geek utopia described there.

From now until March 26, 2010 Google is essentially accepting nominations for the community where they should roll out Google Fiber for Communities. They’re asking both government officials and private citizens to provide information about “their communities through a Request for information (RFI), which we’ll use to determine where to build our network.”

I think it goes without saying that we need to load them up with information about Louisville. 100 times faster than our current internet connections at competitive prices? Yes please. Besides, in their informational video below they say they want to find out what’s possible with this program and we are in fact Possibility City. It’s a natural fit. It’s your job to make sure Google knows that.

So for example, today’s deal is $16 worth of goods at Cake Flour for $8. You buy the $8 coupon at Groupon, take it in to Cake Flour and walk out the door with $16 worth of goodies. As of this writing 140 people have already taken advantage of this offer but if less than 50 people had purchased the coupon then the deal would have gone away and nobody’s credit card would have been charged. Make sense?

I’m always a little suspicious of seemingly too good to be true things but Groupon seems like the real deal. The company just got a large round of funding and added 37 Signals founder Jason Fried to their board. That seriously legitimizes them in my opinion.

So go forth and check out Groupon for yourself. If you follow this link for signingup and buying coupons a Consuming Louisville reader who was clever enough to ask me to use her link will get a $10 prize or something like that. That’s a nice reward for her nudging me to tell you about Groupon isn’t it?

For anyone who’s ever regretted that 3 a.m. trip through the Taco Bell drive-thru, a deliciously fun alternative is coming to your kitchen. “Drunken Cooking, Vegetarian Style,” a new web-based video series, is about to unleash its intoxicated gastronomy on the unsuspecting public.

During each episode the hosts “throw back a few shots of whiskey and demonstrate how to prepare a dish so simple even a drunk could make it, so delicious even a sober person would salivate.” Even I, someone who is a big fan of Twig & Leaf after a night of drinking (mmmmmmm Twig Taters) have to admit that this just sounds festive.

“Drunken Cooking” is a semi-pro production I think. The press release said the on-air talent has help from videobred, Inc and the production uses hi-def cams and other pro equipment. The show’s creator says “This is not a couple frat boys with a handycam and bad audio. We understand the unique difficulties of drunken cooking…a Blair Witch Project filming style could very well make our viewers throw up. We wouldn’t want to do that to your friends.” Such a good point! These people are funny and courteous. I like them already.

http://drunkencookingshow.com/

How does this relate to Louisville? Well Backupify is the brainchild of Louisville entrepreneur Rob May. I’m not sure what his exact title is but I’m pretty sure that Jason Falls also works with Backupify. So yay for cool products created by Louisville folks. But also yay for free stuff because if you signup for a Backupify account between now and January 31, 2010 it’s totally free.

If you sign up during this time period, you get unlimited storage, for free. You get an account that is not a free trial, not free for a limited time, free forever. You can backup your Gmail, Hotmail, Facebook (our app is here), Basecamp, FriendFeed, Twitter, and a total of 15 services we backup. And it is 100% free. We don’t sell your data or anything like that.

You are probably wondering how we make money giving away accounts for free. The answer is that we have a lot more data now on the different types of customers that use our service, and we are building features for the small business and advanced consumer users. Those users will pay for premium accounts. Until then, our goal is to give this away for free for a while to get as many people as possible using our service. This helps push the limits of our technology, test the outlier cases, and gives us more user feedback to incorporate on our product development roadmap.

So if you find yourself storing more and more data online, and you think it might be nice to have your own copy of that data just in case, sign up for Backupify today.

Free stuff pretty much kicks ass just about anytime but free stuff that’s really cool and useful? Well that’s just awesome.

There is so much excitement that the Fairdale Bigfoot has come out of his cave and started Twittering.

He’s got a heck of a sense of humor and is hoping for a career as an advice columnist. To practice he’s taking questions over “the Twitter.” I encourage you to converse with him, it will be the most fun you have at work today.