Carrying a mobile computer in your hands opens up all sorts of sorts of possibilities. It changes the game in terms picking a restaurant, discovering live music or meeting up with friends and family. Of course, there's no shortage of competition in this fast-growing arena, with the likes of Whrrl, Foursquare and Gowalla attacking the market opportunity. But UrbanQ co-founders Maria Zhang and Tao Huang believe there's opportunity still to be had. We chatted with Zhang, who is launching the Redmond company's first iPhone app this week, for the latest installment of "Startup of the Week."

What's your elevator pitch... UrbanQ is a location-based discovery engine personalized just for you. It’s like what Pandora is to music. With UrbanQ, you can discover new places and new experiences you will love simply by giving thumbs-up to what you like.

We came up with the idea... As parents and busy professionals, we have limited free time. When there is some time to spend with family and friends, we all want to have the best experience. That takes a lot of time and effort to plan: search queries after search queries, reading reviews after reviews. Even after finding a place to go to, there goes the “copy, paste, repeat” process to send out invitations, post facebook updates. When I looked for a tool to help me with this process, I found none. So I decided to build one, a mobile/web service that understands my tastes, helps me discover new places and experiences I will love, and makes the entire planning processing within a few clicks.

The word that best describes our company culture is... Lean and Fast. We are very small company with a big ambition. We are very aggressive in innovation and agile in responding to market and customers.

Zhang

We are different from the competition because... We combined personal and social elements into location based search and discover service. UrbanQ understands your tastes from the thumbs up and you give to specific places, then delivers more selections matched to your tastes. Have a favorite place, restaurant, bar or activity? UrbanQ finds more places just like that -- anywhere you go in the U.S. UrbanQ includes a complete set of social features leveraging existing social networks. You can interact with your friends: share your favorites, leave a note, and make plans together. Having both the personal and social elements on top of the location understanding, UrbanQ is a unique product that offers tremendous value to consumers.

The biggest challenge we face is... How to market our product so its value position will shine through in this crowded space.

We've raised... We have put in a lot of sweat into the company and some of our own money.

If we had $3 million, we'd... Keep doing what we are doing at a larger scale and faster pace, and send out big gift baskets to everyone that generously helped us along the way.

The oddest thing about our company is... We are very ambitious in technology and innovation for such a small company. We launched our version one product with a rich feature set and national coverage in all 50 states in the U.S., in many categories including restaurants, coffee, romantic, family friendly, active and sports, nightlife and attractions. We had the option to start smaller, but we decided to take on the challenge to start off with a big goal. It has made the process of building this product a lot more fun because it was so hard. Does that make us odd?

The one thing missing from our business is... A marketing genius that can help take the UrbanQ product and technology platform to millions of users without an enormous marketing budget.

We won't fail because... We will listen to our customers, solve a real problem they have, fix any problems in our product. We will keep trying until our customers are happy with our product and can’t live without it!