Toresto, a location based application to find restaurants, has released an update for its Android application. The new update promises a faster app performance, gives a new look and feel to the app, as well as a handful of other features.
The most interesting part of this update to me however, is the new way Toresto implemented its restaurants data management. As explained by Irawan Surya, Toresto manager, in the previous version, restaurant data in Toresto is managed exclusively by Toresto’s administrators. This sometimes results in lack of or inaccurate data.
“We learn from successful business models similar to ours such as Yelp. We understand that adding initial restaurant data should be done by us. No restaurant owners will bother to add information about their restaurants if they are not convinced that there are a lot of users here”, Surya says.
Meanwhile, Toresto may have finally taken a bold move to allow its users to help improve the database by allowing them to add and edit restaurant data. Surya says that they are hopeful that the growing community of Toresto users will gladly help add new data or editing incorrect ones. “Will users actively help adding and editing restaurants data? While we are hopeful, the fact remains we don’t know for sure if they will or they will not”.
Of course, giving users ability to freely add and edit data comes with some risk. Surya notices that the two biggest risks are data redundancy and accuracy. To tackle this, Toresto has prepared a feature to report redundant or incorrect data. “In the end, we decided to risk it. Well, we won’t definitely know if we don’t try it , do we?” said Surya.
Toresto currently has more than 13,000 active users with more than 50,000 downloads. The number was temporarily declining when people found difficulty to add or edit restaurant data and it had a slow performance in the previous version.
With this new update, Toresto certainly hopes to bounce back. While the new update is only available for its Android users, Toresto promises availability on iOS, Windows Phone 8, and BlackBerry 10 this year.
