Hungry? Download a dinner

We all know the feeling: You're tired, hungry and home late from work. Unless you have your own personal chef waiting at home, dinner is likely to be pizza, Chinese takeout or a cold container of leftover whatever lurking in the back of the fridge. Perhaps you're a working parent with a hungry family to feed, making a quick stop at the grocery store on your way home to figure out something you can make that will be quick, convenient, healthy and maybe take advantage of the store's weekly sale items.

Now a new wireless application can help the busy and culinary challenged shop for and prepare home-cooked meals with the touch of a keypad.

Airborne Entertainment has partnered with the Food Network to offer Cook Express, a database of recipes and cooking tips accessible through Verizon Wireless' Get It Now program. Shoppers can use their phones to key in a specific ingredient or search by meal category, then scroll through a list of Food Network recipes that include ingredient lists, directions and prep time. The program will forward the recipes to the user's home e-mail address as well, and favorites can be bookmarked and accessed later.

Airborne Entertainment President Andy Nulman said his company wanted to develop a program that would be of use to customers when they're on the go. “We did research on this with focus groups and we basically came up with the idea that people could use this type of application when they're outside the home. We basically built the application from the ground up, from the user experience up. This is something we did by tracking the way people use the supermarket and ingredients and how they cook, how they use recipes.”

The application, which costs $2.49 per month on Verizon's Get It Now plan, is updated with new recipes monthly, and also includes Chef Tips and Food Network program times.

“It's an extension into a new area for us. We haven't explored wireless, which to me is almost another form of media, another channel,” said Beth Higbee, vice president of new media at the Food Network. “It's nice to be able to say that we're with the game — we're working with new technologies and we'd like to continue to develop new ways of working with these emerging technologies.”

With applications such as this one, carriers hope to appeal to a broader range of consumers than just the wireless-savvy teens to '20s age group.

“Most observers really expected downloadable applications to be skewed, if not solely, than heavily toward a very young audience, but that's not necessarily what we're seeing,” said Jeffrey Nelson, executive director of corporate communications for Verizon Wireless. “There's a surprise marketplace out there and it is adults. This application, as well as content from magazines, really is being picked up by a much larger audience.”

Airborne Entertainment also has partnered with Wine Spectator magazine to develop the Wine Spectator Mobile Companion, an application that allows wireless users to access the magazine's database of more than 130,000 wine reviews. No carriers have signed on yet, but Nulman says several have expressed interest.

“It's one thing to take something that works elsewhere, and say ‘OK, let's put it on a phone.’” It's another thing to develop applications that are truly at their best when mobile,” Nulman said. “The Wine Spectator companion is another one like that. So if you were out at a wine shop or you're in a restaurant and you want to be sort of a discreet snob, and you want to compare one wine to another and you want to know the right vintage, it's right there in your hand.”

Cook Express went live on Verizon's network in late May, and launched on Sprint PCS' network in early June.