5 Tips from OpenTable in Crafting Your Mobile Strategy

Restaurant reservation software company OpenTable is a true entrepreneurial success story.  They are survivors.  Founded in 1998 and backed by patient investors, they kept scrapping and fighting until finally achieving a successful IPO in May of 2009.

OpenTable knows a little about mobile as well.  2M diners have used OpenTable’s mobile web site and apps to book restaurant reservations, resulting in about $100M in sales for OpenTable’s restaurant clients.

As luck would have it, OpenTable’s Scott Jampol was kind of enough to share the company’s top five mobile learnings during a presentation at the Kelsey Marketplaces conference.  Here they are.

1) Mobile doesn’t mean “simple version of your website.”

OpenTable’s first mobile effort was in the browser.  Because of the small footprint, OpenTable decided the logical thing to do would be to just strip out functionality to make everything fit.  This, according to Jampol, was the wrong strategy.  Consumers don’t consider the platform in evaluating a service’s utility.  They expect a high quality experience on all platforms, and specifically expect mobile services to take advantage of the capabilities offered by the phone.

2) Sell to your installed based first.

It’s a lot easier to get your existing web users to try out your mobile service than it is to find new users.  For example, OpenTable intercepts people accessing their web site on an iPhone with a prompt to try their iPhone app.  Jampol suggests that you market your mobile services across all touch points, and encourage your users to post reviews of the mobile apps in the appropriate stores.  Your installed base is the low hanging fruit.

3) Showcase the platform.

You need Google and Apple to love your app.  If they love it, they will help you grow.  Make sure your service takes full advantage of what each respective platform can do.

4) Staff for support and feedback.

When your app starts getting traction, you will be inundated with help requests from people who barely know how to turn on their phone.  Make sure you’re prepared with the proper resources and processes, and first impressions are crucial.

5) Market in bursts.

Conventional wisdom suggests that a slow and steady marketing level is ideal.  This approach doesn’t take into account the dynamics of the app stores, in which a quick rise to being a “hot” app can result in a burst of organic installs.  Marketing dollars should be spent in bursts to maximize these organic amplifications.

Jampol also gave one bonus point, which was to think of the app stores as turning back the clock on the rapid release cycles popular during the Web 2.0 era.   When dealing with apps, releases should once again be less frequent and more substantial, to take into account the approval processes and download dynamics of the app stores.

When companies that have driven $100M in sales via mobile and have gone IPO take the time to share their thoughts on mobile philosophy, I tend to stop and take notice.

Stay tuned for more nuggets from the Kelsey Marketplaces conference, including some insights from Yelp’s mobile product manager, and a keynote from Groupon’s CEO.


Source: http://thenextweb.com/insider/2010/03/24/5-tips-opentable-crafting-mobile-strategy/

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Source: http://ezinearticles.com/?How-Web-Data-Extraction-Services-Will-Save-Your-Time-and-Money-by-Automatic-Data-Collection&id=5159023

OpenTable to Acquire Foodspotting for $10 Million

Booking a restaurant reservation on the Internet is more convenient than calling a hostess or jotting your name down on a waiting list, but it can feel impersonal. OpenTable, the online reservation business, says it is acquiring a start-up to make booking a table a bit more intimate and social.

The company on Tuesday said it had agreed to buy Foodspotting, the San Francisco social media start-up, for $10 million. On Foodspotting, a user can search for a restaurant or a type of dish, and the search results will display user-uploaded pictures of food at certain restaurants.

How would this fit in with OpenTable? Matt Roberts, chief executive of OpenTable, said that when you book a reservation at a restaurant, you may receive a confirmation e-mail that includes a menu, accompanied with photos of entrees that people recommend eating there.

“If you can have a rich menu with images instead of just words and recommendations of dishes you may like, it really just broadens the experience and helps diners get the most of their evening out,” Mr. Roberts said in an interview.

The purchase of Foodspotting is one of OpenTable’s first steps to use customer data to make dining more personalized. Mr. Roberts imagined a waiter carrying around a tablet loaded with the OpenTable app, which would display a patron’s dining history and show his food preferences or cocktail of choice.

The $10 million purchase of Foodspotting will include hiring 10 of the start-up’s staff members, including its chief executive, Alexa Andrzejewski, who will serve as an interface designer. The start-up had raised $3 million in funding in 2011.

Soraya Darabi, a founder of Foodspotting who is no longer at the company, and previously worked at The New York Times, said the start-up’s database now had three million photos of dishes from all around the world, and users are adding a few hundred thousand photos every month.

Not all restaurant owners will be thrilled about the idea of customer-taken photos showing up alongside their menus. Some restaurateurs have prohibited photography of their dishes because it can be distracting to other diners and chefs.

Mr. Roberts said he didn’t think this would be a problem. He said users of Foodspotting typically voted for photos that are of the highest quality, which gives them more weight.

“We think restaurants will be broadly enthusiastic and appreciate the way their brand and dishes can be shared,” he said, adding that OpenTable could also give restaurants the tools to share their own photos of their dishes.

Source: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/29/opentable-to-acquire-foodspotting-for-10-million/

Following OpenTable Deal, Restaurant Data Provider Locu Adds More Big-Name Partners, TripAdvisor And CitySearch

Locu, a local business data provider which extracts structured data from business websites and then makes it available via an API, is today announcing two major new partnerships, specifically for its restaurant data: CitySearch and TripAdvisor. The news comes only a couple of months after OpenTable signed with Locu on a similar deal.

The new partnerships will expand Locu’s reach to TripAdvisor and CitySearch’s users on both web and mobile, offering access to restaurants’ current menus, as well as their ever-changing daily specials, wine lists and more. The updates come from those restaurant owners who have signed up with Locu to take ownership of their data in order to use their pages on sites like OpenTable as a marketing tool to bring in customers with their ongoing promotions.

Locu design template 2The OpenTable partnership put Locu’s service in front of some 15,000 potential customers in the U.S., 4,000 in the U.K., and others in Canada. (OpenTable doesn’t report data on Canada). In the same way, the new partnerships will also expand Locu’s reach to those businesses that have never yet before heard of the service, but will find the new listings referenced as “powered by Locu,” upon launch.

Locu emerged from Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s lab at MIT with lofty goal of providing structure to the world’s information. It began with the notoriously difficult restaurant industry, whose websites have traditionally been a mess, often including Flash-based webpages, for example. The company uses a proprietary machine-learning system to automatically extract data about local businesses from those websites, and it then leverages crowd workers trained to clean up and correct the data using special markup language.

The end result is machine-readable data that can then be offered to others via an API. Today, Locu has hundreds of API partners, which in addition to the bigger names above, also include Timeout, CityVoter, Maluuba and more.

The majority of Locu’s data today is from restaurants, but co-founder  Rene Reinsberg says he expects that to change by year-end 2013, as Locu rapidly moves into spas, salons, and other service-based businesses. “We’re really thinking about some of these other verticals,” says Reinsberg, “and some of these other verticals require slightly different technology because not as much information may be online.” In other words, the company is now working to develop a new set of tools to pull in “offline data” into its platform and API.

Those technologies would also include the use of crowdsourcing, which Locu has experience with. But while its current cloud-based workforce is spread around the world, to gain access to this offline data – say, by having users walk into businesses and snap photos, for example, or simply dialing the business and asking questions – it would need to develop a larger work force here in the U.S. Reinsberg says Locu has not yet decided whether to partner with another businesses for access to this data or to build something itself. He says the company is currently testing a variety of solutions, but has no immediate partnership plans on this front.

Locu is scaling its web-scraped data collection quickly. In November, it had around half a million businesses in its database, and now that number is close to 1 million.

locu-website

TripAdvisor and CitySearch’s integrations are not fully live, but they will be over the course of the next few weeks. As of now, Locu’s menus are already live on over 100,000 restaurants on the Citysearch mobile site (for example), and tomorrow morning, those will be live on the web as well (again, for example).

The company also says it plans to ramp up to cover 700,000 venues, including restaurants, spas and other verticals. Citysearch is in over 500 markets across the U.S. but the initial rollout will focus heavily on 10 markets: L.A., NY, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Austin, Seattle, Houston, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.

Meanwhile, Locu’s data will be integrated to tens of thousands of TripAdvisor’s more than one million restaurant listings globally, as the company is primarily drawing from Locu’s U.S. database. TripAdvisor says it expects the changes to roll out in February.

Source URL: http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/15/following-opentable-deal-restaurant-data-provider-locu-adds-more-big-name-partners-tripadvisor-and-citysearch/