Marketplaces 2010: Urbanspoon Blowing Up

Urbanspoon, our pre-season pick for favored mobile loca app, has passed half a billion shakes (searches), according to CEO Jay Herratti during his keynote at Marketplaces 2010 today.

This comes almost a year after Urbanspoon was bought by IAC and integrated with Citysearch. The app has also been downloaded 9 million times and is the fifth most popular free app in the iTunes Travel category, after Yelp (another mobile speaker at Marketplaces 2010), according to TechCrunch.

TechCrunch also points out that Urbanspoon’s online site now gets 7 million monthly uniques, a 220 percent year-over-year increase. Many of our mobile panelists today talked about the ROI for building an iPhone app. For Urbanspoon, it’s been clear: brand lift, acquisition and online traffic growth … more than could be achieved through any marketing budget.