Driving to the park today, I asked my wife to give the iPhone a shake to see what restaurants were nearby. Of course, we were using the wildly popular Urbanspoon app which uses the phone's accelerometer (hence the shaking) and the built-in GPS to detect nearby restaurants.

Turns out we're not the only ones shaking our phones in search of a good restaurant. Urbanspoon co-founder Ethan Lowry tells TechCrunch that they have recorded more than 70 million shakes since launching the application in July. Just as impressive, they have more than 2.2 million iPhone owners who have downloaded the application. (Helped in part of course by Apple's recent TV ad featuring Urbanspoon.)

In the detailed interview, Lowry talks about developing the application for Android, the company's ad model and how they came up with the Urbanspoon name.