Tummyrumble

links for 2007-02-28

• Technology Review: A Practical Internet for Your Phone
  This week, Mobio will introduce its first product: a suite of free, downloadable "widgets" for cell phones. These widgets can collect real-time information from a number of different Web services--for instance, mapping services and directory listings for
  (tags: mobile guide restaurants booking aggregator widget)
• Mobility - focus on the positives, not the negatives and it is to internet like TV is to radio | Communities Dominate Brands
  Mobile as the 7th mass media is as much superior to the internet, as TV is to radio. Today at 2.7 billion mobile phone users, there are three times as many mobile phones as personal computers (and over a quarter of all internet access is already from mobi
  (tags: internet marketing media mobile inspiration essay)

K serves Geoffrey's Chicken

Kate serves Geoffrey's Chicken
Originally uploaded by Manne.

Yesterday was A&P's last night in the UK for a long while. They are going back to Australia to start a new phase in their lives. House, kids and long term stability. To send them off proper K cooked us an awesome meal which I just had to get the recipe for: Geoffrey's Chicken.

Mobile dining follow up

A few days ago I found news of a mobile tourist guide launched by M-Spatial in Spain where WCities in collaboration with Toptable deliver city guides with a restaurant booking facility. The guide is actually accesible with an ordinary browser, you find it at go.wcities.com.

Built entirely in xhtml the application should be viewable on any modern mobile device and with the right equipment at the phone operator readily transformed to other formats needed to reach older devices as well.

Browsing through restaurants in Barcelona I can't find any bookable restaurants, but phone numbers, email addresses and a fair bit of content is easily accesible and presented in a good way with the most interesting information at the "top" and more details on a sub "page" as you need it. Will have to go through it more in detail later, I am really interested in seeing how they implemented the booking flow.

links for 2007-02-26

• Speed up Firefox with these tweaks
  A few settings changed can make Firefox go faster. Wonder if it may have performance impacts on a slow computer though.
  (tags: browser firefox tips)
• How do you get a table ... at the last minute? | Food and drink | Life and Health
  The Guardaian has done a little quick survey on how easy it is to get a table at a fancy London restaurant at the very last minute. Quite amusing. Would be fun to make a more serious test of this actually.
  (tags: restaurants booking fun testing)

Guestbridge, US restaurant diary software

This article describes an up and coming software offering for restaurants developed by Guestbridge, an American company based in Milwaukee.

Link: JS Online: 'Your usual, Mr. Smith?'.

GuestBridge's products help restaurant operators take reservations, keep tabs on which tables are available as guests come and go and maintain detailed profiles on their customers.

Guestbridge calls it a "Wait List & Guest Management Software". In the article are two interesting pictures, showing it is a Windows based system, seems to be locally installed and the operator in the photo accesses it through Remote Desktop.

Fadcinating how similar Guestbridge's background is to our own, all the way back to ties to reservations for the golf industry (the Swedish side of the Livebookings operation has a background from golfing, where as the UK side stems totally from a restaurant operation background).

In the article a lot of emphasis is placed on knowing more and more details about your regular customers in order to provide them with good service tailored to their preferences, dining history and personal details. While I agree and feel this is increasingly important, I am surprised they don't talk more about managing reservations and getting bookings from off- and online sources aditional to the restaurant's normal channels.

Open Table, as expected being the biggest competitor in the US, is mentioned as "the 800-pound gorilla" of the restaurant software business. Alex Brennan-Martin, owner (no, he is not an owner, sloppy reading on my part, Brennan Pardee of Guestbridge kindly pointed out my mistake) long term client of Guestbridge, points out that Open Table owns the data collected through the Open Table system where as using Guestbridge the restaurant owns the collected data and gets more flexibility to use it.

No hard figures, other than having 10 employees, is presented on Guestbridge who say that their first profit will be posted in 2007. The fact that a restaurant group, one of Guestbridge's current customers, bought 35% of the company about two years ago should give some indication of size on the market though.