Urbanspoon

Urbanspoon

The rise of GPS-equipped smartphones is enticing advertisers with the hope of pitching consumers as they walk past an actual store. In March, Google (GOOG) began testing whether the idea's time has come. San Francisco restaurant Leila Mediterranean Cuisine paid the search giant to get its text ads on Urbanspoon, a mobile application that identifies what neighborhood users are in and how much they're willing to spend on their next meal. "I used to spend over $100,000 a year putting ads in the Yellow Pages," says Sam Fard, owner of Leila, which caters to the financial district lunch crowd. "Never again."

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