Sponsored post — Lunchster helps you organize your lunch dates

The fol­low­ing is a sponsored post, com­mis­sioned by Lunch­ster, via Izea. Though this is a paid post, the words and ideas below are mine.

Hook­ing up with friends for lunch has always been a bit of a chal­lenge for me, and I’ve always been look­ing for a way to make it easi­er. I don’t often write sponsored posts on my blog, but this oppor­tun­ity came up and it looks like an applic­a­tion I’ll use, so of course I wanted to share 😉

Lunch­ster launched (sorry) in beta today at DEMO fall ’09, a con­fer­ence / tradeshow where, in the words of the con­fer­ence organizers:

Each com­pany is giv­en just six minutes on the DEMO stage to truly demon­strate how their product will change the world. No Power­Point or flashy cor­por­ate present­a­tions allowed. Just the founders and the tech­no­lo­gies many are stak­ing their careers on… it doesn’t get any more straight­for­ward and fast paced than that.

Time for Lunchster
Basic­ally, Lunch­ster acts as vir­tu­al assist­ant that coordin­ates lunch dates between me and my friends using email, online cal­en­dar­ing pro­grams (Google Cal­en­dar, etc) and even Facebook.

The pro­cess works like this:

1. Sign up and log into Lunchster
2. Either let Lunch­ster import your con­tact list, or manu­ally enter email addresses of your lunch-mates
3. Select a time, date and place for your lunch
4. Con­firm and send out the invitations

Lunch­ster does the rest. All your con­tacts will receive email invit­a­tions to your lunch, and can reply accord­ingly. If a date does­n’t work out, all con­tacts can tweak the lunch date or decline. Lunch­ster does all the work and you don’t have to coördin­ate email, IM, tweets, etc. It’s all in Lunchster.

My Take-away
Lunch­ster is cool. The inter­face is a little rough around the edges, but I really liked the way I could set up a lunch appoint­ment — the applic­a­tion uses Yelp! to aid with res­taur­ant choice, and works with my exist­ing cal­en­dar­ing tools (Google Cal­en­dar and Outlook).

I’m not a big fan of allow­ing applic­a­tions free access to my con­tact list (though Lunch­ster does say in mul­tiple places that they don’t save my pass­word, etc). Big points to Lunch­ster for allow­ing me to manu­ally enter my lunch-bud­dies email addresses.

I guess the hard part for me is to get into the habit of using anoth­er applic­a­tion. As long as I remem­ber to use it, I’ll use Lunch­ster the next time I need to coördin­ate a lunch.

You can join the Lunch­ster beta (it seems open) or fol­low @lunchster on Twit­ter, to keep up to date.

The pre­ced­ing was a sponsored post for Lunchster.