GoodEatsFor.Me

Setting aside risk, more launching own companies

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 11:28:28 -0500

There’s a nice article in Sunday’s edition of the Boston Herald about entrepreneurship.

GoodEatsFor.Me and I both get a nice shout out at the tail end of the article. Full text of the article is below (original link.) Thanks Jennifer!

Typically, it’s the entrepreneurs and the small- business owners who pull an economy out of a recession. But this one has been different.

Housing values dropped. Bank loans to small companies declined. Markets around the world that might have picked up the slack stumbled. Many would-be entrepreneurs were either too scared to get started or they couldn’t find the funds.

That appears to be changing, according to a report released last week. The number of people launching or running young companies worldwide grew about 60 percent last year to nearly 400 million, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Report.

Rather than being an indication of how good things are now, however, it’s a sign of how bad they’ve been. The number of new entrepreneurs in the United States hasn’t been this high since 2005, well before the economic plunge.

“It could be that people delayed starting businesses,” said Donna Kelley, a co-author of the report and Babson College professor, explaining the jump. “It could be that people don’t see their jobs coming back.”

In the United States, more people saw opportunities and planned to start businesses, even while the fear of failure climbed to 31.2 percent from 26.7 percent in the previous year.

“People may see more risk in starting a business, and this may be linked to the recession,” Kelley said.

New business owners agreed that there’s risk, but said they couldn’t wait.

Matt Chatham had been working on his plans for a SkyCrepers, a crepe franchise, for more than five years when he finally launched the company in 2010. During that time, he was going to school and developing the concept.

“I would be hesitant if I were coming to the market with something that already existed,” said Chatham, a former Patriots [team stats] linebacker. “I felt more comfortable because we’re unique and we’re filling a void.”

Michael Norwood, who has launched two companies in recent months, said he’d rather face the unpredictability of launching a business than that of the job market.

“I figured if I can succeed in an uncertain economic environment than I can survive in good times,” he said.

Norwood is building Type-U, a social movement for families of people with diabetes, and runs a mobile flip-flop store called Woodywear Mobile Merchandise.

Some have hesitated to start because they didn’t think they could raise enough money, but attitudes have changed, said James Hilton, co-founder of Jacox-Hilton Producer Consulting, which provides analysis tools for life insurance advisers.

“Folks are starting to get used to the idea that they will have to bootstrap,” he said.

GoodEatsFor.Me founder Ajit Verghese said entrepreneurs have had to get creative about financing.

“The realities of launching a startup is that regardless of how lean you can make your operations, you still require capital,” he said. “So to fund myself and the business, I became entrepreneurial, went back to my digital roots and started consulting with big and small brands.”

Verghese’s venture, which helps hospitality companies track their social media, started work on the company in 2009 and went live with the beta site in 2010.

“I’ve spent the past 32 months working, traveling and speaking with many established and budding entrepreneurs, angel investors, venture capitalists and large brands,” he said. “I’m seeing a lot of innovation, new ideas launched and more risks taken from entrepreneurs in and outside the U.S.”

2011 in review: we accomplished a lot and have so much more to do in 2012!

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:32:00 -0500

It is customary to spend the tail end of every year reflecting on what has transpired over the past 12 months. Goal setting ensues once the 1st day of the new year arrives, with a focus on self improvement, elimination of vices and lofty milestones.

I’ve been terrible in consistently documenting efforts to grow our company. I hope to do a better job in the coming months, in addition to growing our business, increasing the traction we currently have and raising some capital. We’ll write more in the coming weeks about some new developments and directions, but for now, here’s an analysis of what has taken place over the last 12 months.

2011 was a year full of success and failure and galvanizing experiences that helped us grow GoodEatsFor.Me and better understand our business, our customers, ourselves and the challenges of startup life.

In January of 2011 we applied to TechStars Boston for the second time. Unlike the previous year, we had a product and some customer feedback and as such were selected to attend TechStars For A Day (#TS4AD) in Boston to meet the team and discuss our candidacy. Unfortunately, i was traveling outside of the US when we found out that we were asked to attend TS4AD. Lucky for me i have an awesome cofounder in Mike who got on the Acela from NYC, came down to Boston and represented us well (despite contracting a horrible case of food poisoning the night before - a story of epic proportions ). While we thought we made a compelling case for Techstars Boston in 2011, alas it was not to be.

We had applied to the New York University Stern School of Business New Venture competition (Mike’s alma mater) at the end of 2010 and were in the throes of competition around the same time we received our TechStars Boston rejection. Mike and I had applied to the competition in 2008 with our failed startup CoachAlly and progressed to the quarterfinals. Over the course of the next several months up through April 2011, Mike and I updated the competition committee on our progress and perfected our pitch deck. We steadily advanced throughout the competition to the semifinals, but after 9 months of competition, we didn’t make the finals and had to be content with being one of 30 semifinalists in competition from an original set of 230 teams.

In February, our application to the Foursquare app gallery was approved and we were included amongst all the other apps that use the Foursquare API. We recieved a lot of signups from our inclusion in the app gallery.

Around the same time we were negotiating our first marketing and distribution partnership with Managed Data Group, a Point-of-sale integrator who helps hospitality establishments normalize the point of sale data across multiple businesses. This partnership provided us with distribution, revenue and good customer feedback about our offering and where we needed to focus our efforts.

As this was the first time Mike and I needed to officially sign something, we needed to incorporate. Through the wonderful introduction of our friend and fellow entrepreneur Russell Wallace (CEO of CivicSponsor) I ended up connecting with Richard Hesp at the law firm Gunderson Dettmer. They got us incorporated, helped us negotiate the contract and supported us through the entrepreneurial process. They’ll be helpful to us and we hope to use their services a lot more over the coming months as we grow the business and raise our first round.

Press opportunities are always good and I was approached by my friend Mike Schneider at the end of March 2011 to talk about a new book he was coauthoring with Aaron Strout - location based marketing for dummies. We ended up submitting a writeup and were included in the book as ‘one of the management tools to use’. The book was published in August of 2011 and you can get your copy on Amazon here.

Mike and his colleague Eric Liest of Allen & Gerritsen were kind enough to interview me on their web show TechInterruption talking about the future of GoodEats and my thoughts on the industry at the end of April 2010.

In early May I also ended up representing GoodEatsFor.Me on a Tastybytes panel entitled “LBS - Not Just for Mayors” hosted by Compete.com.

We received some press mentions over the course of the year, including a mention in Xconomy in July, a mention in Scott Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog in September and a nice piece in the Boston Business Journal in December of 2011.

We are excited about 2012 and are hard at work launching some new things that we hope will help our customers and the industry.

As of January 2012, we have over 100+ beta signups and are working on some big improvements to the site that should help merchants get more value out of GoodEatsFor.Me and help us open up the beta to anyone who wants to sign up to try out our service for free! A bunch of improvements are going to make GoodEatsFor.Me the easiest system to set up and monitor the social activity around your establishment and we are experimenting with a big new idea that should help both our fellow hospitality Startups and the merchants they service. We hope to announce more at the end of the month, so stay tuned and thank you for your support.

GoodEatsFor.Me mentioned in Boston Business Journal

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 14:36:15 -0500

GoodEatsFor.Me was mentioned several times in a Boston Business Journal article from December 16, 2011 entitled “Tech on the menu: Bevy of local companies helping to modernize restaurant sector.” Screenshot and full text of the article are below. Thanks to Josh Bob, CEO of Textaurant/Turnstar for the introduction to Kyle Alspach, VC Editor of the Boston Business Journal.

Full text below:

Tech on the menu: Bevy of local companies helping to modernize restaurant sector

Kyle Alspach

VC Editor - Boston Business Journal

Traditionally, restaurants have been some of the most Luddite of businesses, says Ajit Verghese, co-founder of GoodEatsFor.Me.

“They just want to do what they do — make food and have awesome drinks. They don’t want to deal with the computer,” said Verghese, whose startup tracks what people are saying about restaurants on social media and helps restaurants to put the information to use.

But unless you’re among the most established of restaurants, ignoring diners’ technology habits isn’t really an option anymore. And a number of Boston area tech startups are helping to connect customers and restaurants, on the web and on mobile devices.

Tasted Menu Inc. of Brookline competes in the dish-recommendation space, and in November launched a website with menus for 1,300 Boston restaurants. The three-person company plans to put out an iPhone app within weeks, said founder Alex Rosenfeld.

Users see a restaurant’s complete menu, and every dish is tagged based on its characteristics — which comes out to 90,000 different dishes in Boston. The company aims to earn revenue by helping restaurants to do targeted promotions to customers, he said.

FoodieBytes LLC, a four-person Burlington startup that launched early this year, has looked to combine individual dish reviews and ratings at restaurants with deals at those restaurants. Founder Ajay Bhandarisays the site has been getting 100,000 unique visitors a month, who have the option of paying a $10 fee to get discounts of up to 40 percent on meals. The site has deals at nearly 1,000 restaurants around the U.S. and has 16 on board in Massachusetts.

Textaurant Corp. of Brookline is working with nearly 30 restaurants — about half in the Northeast — to provide a service that lets customers get notified that their table is ready via text, so they don’t have to hang around the restaurant waiting. Restaurants pay a monthly fee for the service.

The four-person startup plans to broaden the service to allow for reservations by text and to also send customers a post-visit survey on their phones, said Textaurant founder Josh Bob.

Boston’s The Pintley Company LLC’s current offering is a beer recommendation app. FounderTim Noetzel says the plan is to expand into doing recommendations on restaurants and other hang-outs within a month. “We want to shift the application from being the best way to discover beer that you love, to the best way to discover a better night out,” he said.

Customers of GoodEatsFor.Me, also of Boston, get a customized dashboard with a feed of activity concerning their restaurant on Twitter, Facebook and foursquare.

“It’s all about understanding what people were saying, and ultimately who they were,” Verghese said “So if you were the restaurant you could figure out if you’re doing a good job, bad job, who their loyal patrons are.”

He declined to say exactly how many restaurants are using the beta service, saying only that it’s less than 50. Customers are located in Boston, New York and Washington, D.C.

In Cambridge, seven-person startup Locu Inc. has developed what its owners say is the easiest platform for updating a restaurant’s menu on its website. The company offers restaurants a widget that automatically updates the menu without having to do any coding, said Locu CEO and co-founder Rene Reinsberg. The product is in private beta and is expected to move into public beta in the first quarter, with commercial launch soon to follow, Reinsberg said.

Exit41 Inc. is older compared to the startups in the sector.

The Andover company was founded in 1999. The company is now on its third life cycle, but this time seems to be finding traction, said CEO Chet Barnard, who joined the company in January.

The 20-person company offers a software platform for online ordering at large chain restaurants, including Bertucci’s (100 restaurants on the East Coast of the U.S.) and Cara (200 Swiss Chalet restaurants in Canada).

Since launching the offering two years ago, Exit41 has grown to serve 40 brands and close to 1,500 restaurants in total, Barnard said. Unlike with services such as GrubHub, Exit41’s platform sits directly on the restaurants’ websites.

The company hopes to enjoy a large helping of new customers in the near future.

“We think this market is still early,” Barnard said. “We believe strongly that in the next 12 to 24 months, this will no longer be an elective for brands.”

It is not about (daily) deals, it is about leads.

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:56:00 -0400

There’s been a lot of discussions recently about the daily deals space. With Groupon’s IPO in limbo (and journalist/blogger Rocky Agrawal’s must-read series of insightful takes on the company) , Facebook and Yelp’s scaling back of their deal offers and (despite that) a spate of copycats growing everyday - everyone’s focus is on daily deals.

And I think we’re missing a much bigger opportunity.

To me, the value that daily deals sites bring to a restaurant is that they are selling restaurants a list of customer leads. The business goal of restaurants are to get as many people in as many seats as possible and deal sites provide a list of people that are willing to put themselves in those seats. Those people are leads and restaurants are paying daily deal sites a pretty for those leads.

The problem with these leads is that they are ‘shitty’ leads. Much like the characters in the movie Glenngary Glenn Ross, merchants feel that they need to use these ‘shitty’ leads in order to get to the good leads - the Glen Ross leads! There are various motivations for running deals across different platforms - but the end goal of restaurants is to fill as many seats as possible on a consistent basis with customers - and the hope is that the customers that come into restaurants based on the deal/promotion will become (repeat) loyal customers. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to be the case. You cannot turn a ‘shitty’ lead into a good lead.

But here’s the rub: you don’t need these ‘shitty’ leads - in many cases the great (Glenngarry) leads are out there - volunteered by customers and for the taking.

How so? Well - customers continue to interact with your restaurant across multiple social channels - taking pictures of your food on Foodspotting, checking in and/or leaving tips (and the occasional picture) on Foursquare, talking about your dishes, the quality of your service, recommending food and drink, or times to visit on Twitter and Facebook and a host of other actions across new and upcoming services.

And while these actions that customers are taking are important to the operation of your business - these actions help identify these customers - who are your good leads!

Why are they good leads? Well, for one thing, they know you exist and based on whatever action that they’ve taken they are either existing customers or potential customers. They have come in and engaged with your restaurant. These customers are a targeted, segmented list of individuals that you should market and promote to.

There are lots of actions that consumers can take across multiple services - and keeping track of all those consumers can be hard. That’s where GoodEatsFor.Me comes in - we help you collect this customer activity, understand what these customers say, like and do, and help define this customer base and give you easy ways to market towards them.

It takes time, but will generate results. And without using GoodEatsFor.Me, restaurants can achieve this goal - although GoodEatsFor.Me really does make it easy. ;)

Cultivating leads helps establish better relationships between your business and your customers. Better relationships provide you with an understanding of who your customers are, what they want and most importantly what they are willing to purchase. And this will help you target your efforts and ultimately evolve to a better and more efficient sales process while building up loyalty amongst your customers.

It is not about deals, it is about leads.

"Mobile social media boosts Tasti D-lite’s ability to interact with consumers. Those connections are..."

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 13:04:09 -0400

“Mobile social media boosts Tasti D-lite’s ability to interact with consumers. Those connections are going to lead to conversations. Conversations lead to relationships and relationships lead to transactions.”

- Tasti D-lite serves up social media tips
Connecting with consumers via foursquare and Twitter boosts customer service.

GoodEatsFor.Me mentioned by Scott Kirsner in the Boston Globe

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 14:36:00 -0400

GoodEatsFor.Me gets a nice mention in a roundup article by Boston Globe technology columnist Scott Kirsner on his Innovation Economy blog.

The TableTech rundown: Boston start-ups trying to upgrade the restaurant experience

By Scott Kirsner, Globe Columnist
Cambridge-based Locu announced today that it has collected more than $600,000 in funding from angel investors, making it the latest restaurant-related start-up to raise money. Who else in Boston is trying to improve the experience of eating out? Here’s my list…
- TotalTab. View your bill at a bar or restaurant, and pay it using your mobile phone. Self-funded so far. Founder Nick Reuter says the company will look to raise money early next year, when it has a beta version operating in a local restaurant.

- Tasted Menu. Founded in 2009 by a recent Harvard Business School grad, the company is still in stealth mode, but seems to want to tap your social network to recommend specific dishes at restaurants. Has raised an unspecified amount of angel funding. Founder Alex Rosenfeld says coyly, “We’re a new entrant in the restaurant social recommendation space. We’ll be complementary to some existing players, competitive with others, but most importantly I think we’re bringing something proprietary, unique, and (most importantly) useful to the table, no pun intended.”

- Locu (formerly Goodplates). When I first wrote about Goodplates back in May, the MIT-spawned start-up was hoping to persuade diners to use their mobile phones to take photos of their food at restaurants, and upload ratings and reviews to a Web site. But as founder Rene Reinsberg began to demo the service publicly, and pitch investors, he started to notice how crowded the resto-tech space was. Over the summer, Goodplates changed its name — the company is now known as Locu (pronounced “low-koo”) — and began focusing on using humans and intelligent software to digitize and categorize information from restaurant menus. They plan to help restaurants share menu information with lots of Web sites and mobile apps that would like to deliver it to their users, and create an API that will give developers access to the info. Pricing isn’t yet set, but they hope to generate revenue from both parties. Raised $600,000 this month from a group of angel investors. (That’s the Locu team pictured at right.)

- Leaf. Cambridge company trying to render extinct that faux-leather bill presenter that’s dropped at your table at the end of the meal. What if instead, your waiter handed you a small tablet computer that allowed you to review what you’d eaten, split the check, figure out the tip, rate each individual dish and beverage, and swipe your credit card to pay?

- AisleBuyer. mDine service, announced last month, will allow you to use your mobile phone to choose what you’d like to eat and pay using your mobile phone. Company hasn’t yet announced any café or restaurant partners. AisleBuyer has raised $11.5 million

- Textaurant. Brookline start-up that enables restaurants to manage their wait-lists with a PC, and buzz diners when they’re ready via their mobile phones (instead of those expensive coaster-shaped pagers.) In use at Fire & Ice in Boston, Finale in Cambridge, and Jerry Remy’s at Fenway (only on game days). Hoping to raise a seed round in the next quarter. (I covered them here last fall.)

- Objective Logistics. Trying to motivate servers — and increase restaurant revenues — by ranking performance on a leaderboard. In use at several local Not Your Average Joe’s locations.

- Crave Labs. Helping restaurants expand their customer base using social media and mobile devices.

- GoodEatsFor.Me. Similar to Crave Labs, helping restaurants use social media to see what diners are saying, and distribute special offers.

- Survey on the Spot. Newton company assists restaurants with designing feedback surveys that customers can fill out on smartphones or tablet computers. In use at restaurants like British Beer Company and The Ninety Nine.

(Last year, I wrote about E La Carte, another TableTech company that was born in Boston, but is now based in Palo Alto.)

GoodEatsFor.Me included in Location Based Marketing for Dummies Book!

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 14:35:00 -0400

On September 6, 2011, Mike Schneider and Aaron Strout’s book, Location Based Marketing for Dummies hit online bookstores and news stands. The book helps businesses understand and develop Location Based Marketing programs to promote customer loyalty, drive customer engagement and improve the bottom line.

GoodEatsFor.Me was fortunate enough to be included in the section “Choosing a Third Party Dashboard” - take a look at the screenshot below from the Kindle version:

This book is a great reference book for small businesses and it is tremendously helpful in providing a good way to get started with location based platforms. Go pick up a copy for yourself! Thanks Mike and Aaron for including us!

GoodEatsFor.Me mentioned in Xconomy interview with Josh Bob, CEO of Textaurant

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:16:00 -0400

Our friend Josh Bob, CEO of Textaurant / Turnstar was interviewed by Gregory Huang for the Xconomy blog on July 21st, 2011 for a piece entitled “Where Does Textaurant Fit Into the Future of Restaurant Tech? Founder Josh Bob Speaks” . Josh was kind enough to give GoodEatsFor.Me a mention. Thanks Josh!

Where Does Textaurant Fit Into the Future of Restaurant Tech? Founder Josh Bob Speaks

Gregory T. Huang

7/21/11

Maybe it’s because I’m hungry, but I’ve been thinking about the future of restaurants lately. Like a lot of people, I eat out far too often, and I have strong feelings about the way the experience should go—the food, the service, the ambience, and so on.

So does Josh Bob. OK, it’s his job (though maybe he’s hungry too). Bob is the founder and CEO of Boston-based Textaurant, a startup that runs a mobile service aimed at taking the hassle out of waiting for a table, and boosting customer loyalty through deals and offers. Using the service, restaurants can send text alerts to customers’ mobile phones telling them their table is almost ready. So Textaurant does away with buzzers and pagers and tries to reduce the workload on the host, while helping the restaurant win over customers who would otherwise leave and not come back.

In case you’re wondering if this causes restaurants to lose out on business from people waiting at the bar, Bob says surveys show more than 40 percent of people will leave (and not even consider going to the bar) if told there is a long wait. That’s the lost business Textaurant is trying to save—and not just by texting them, but also by opening up a channel whereby restaurants can offer special deals and rewards.

The three-person startup is backed by Massachusetts angel investors (and 500 Startups’ Twilio micro-fund) and counts among its dozen or so customers Finale Desserterie & Bakery, Fire + Ice, and Red Robin Gourmet Burgers. It is a finalist in the MassChallenge accelerator program. (You can expect a rebranding and name change along with a new website in the next month, Bob says.)

Textaurant is part of a thriving mini-cluster of food- and restaurant-related startups around Boston that also includes Plummelo, I Am Hungry, Text My Food, Good Eats For Me, and Objective Logistics (see profile here). To some extent, the technologies offered by these companies are a subset of the local-marketing, loyalty, and deals systems that have permeated small-business life as of late. But restaurants have their own quirks and challenges. They are not usually the most eager adopters of new technologies, which can be very polarizing among their managers and staff.

“The restaurant industry has to change,” Bob says. “Anyone who doesn’t use technology will get left behind.”

So here’s his vision of what going to a restaurant will be like five years from now. You’ll decide you want to go to a certain type of restaurant (Italian or Chinese, say) or a particular neighborhood, he says. You’ll use your mobile device to look at Textaurant, which will show you that there are five Italian places nearby, say, and what the wait time is at each of them. You’ll check yourself in at one of the restaurants—with or without setting foot in it—and customize how the table alert will come to you (via text, voice, Twitter, or e-mail). You can also pre-order drinks for the table so they’ll be waiting for you when you sit down.

What’s more, your phone will be connected to your bill so you can accrue loyalty points based on purchases and receive special offers (like a free appetizer at the bar), he says. And on your way out, you’ll pay through your Textaurant account or another mobile system connected to your credit card or payment account.

Groupon, by the way, will have morphed into something else that’s probably unrecognizable today, Bob says. (Presumably along with other daily deal sites.) Not that it’s a bad thing, of course.

“There will always be significant value in helping businesses survive,” he says.

ajitmusic: Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by...

Fri, 06 May 2011 16:00:05 -0400

ajitmusic:

Last week I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mike Schneider (@schneidermike) and Eric Leist (@ericleist) from Allen & Gerritsen on their show Tech Interruption (#techi).

It was a great time and I had a chance to talk about GoodEatsFor.Me. Tech Interruption is modeled after ESPN’s Pardon The Interruption. So check out ‘Four Good Minutes’ with myself, SchneiderMike and Eric!

What Is the Hamburger Sushi Problem on Yelp?

Fri, 06 May 2011 12:00:05 -0400

What Is the Hamburger Sushi Problem on Yelp?:

ajitmusic:

SchneiderMike has a great post up called ‘What is the Hamburger Sushi Problem on Yelp?’. It talks about the problems with getting Yelp reviews that are accurate to a number of people but not necessarily applicable to you for a number of reasons. He refers to it as ‘Hamburger / Sushi problem’ where the reviewer normally eats hamburgers and not sushi - as such the review is outside of the reviewer’s traditional reviews and might not be as reliable as a review from someone that eats lots of sushi.

Great post - check it out. I think that looking at the ‘taste preference’ from Hunch could help solve this. From my comments on SchneiderMike’s post:

I struggle with this all the time when looking at Yelp. I try and triage a few different sources to get an understanding of a restaurant.

I’ll check out the Foursquare tips on a restaurant - I assume them to be more relevant to my demographic given that Foursquare users are closer demographically to me. I sometimes also search Twitter to see if anyone says anything. I will also quickly scan the Yelp reviews, eliminating those that focus on non-food/drink aspects of the restaurant - in my experience unless there is a trend of horrible service mentions, reviews that focus on non-food/drink are usually critics beating a drum for a number of reasons that probably don’t affect me.

What would be extremely useful in addition to the frequency/cuisine segmentations and the influencer model that you mentioned - would also be a ‘taste segment’ understanding how similar the reviewers ‘tastes’ are to my own. Using the Hunch API, Yelp could analyze its user base and then understand their taste preferences. And as such then create personas around some of the wonderful attributes that the taste preferences provide. This segmented user base could help provide you with an understanding of how similar you are to the other reviewer - and as a user you can ascribe your level of trust and relevance to that reviewer and to that review.

A simpler solution using the Hunch API would be to show you a taste relevance score for each reviewer as a percentage of how close they are to you. Close to 100% is a great match, <30% interpret the opposite of what the review states.

Doesn’t totally solve the Hamburger Sushi problem as I have friends with similar tastes in many regards whose recommendations and reviews of food don’t entirely jive with mine, however combining all of these segments provides us with a higher probability that Yelp reviews are going to steer us to the best choice.

We’re looking at how these taste preferneces come into play with GoodEatsFor.Me. I think they are really powerful for consumers AND businesses.

TastyBytes Boston – Location-Based Services: Not Just For Mayors

Fri, 06 May 2011 09:00:05 -0400

TastyBytes Boston – Location-Based Services: Not Just For Mayors:

ajitmusic:

On April 14th I participated on Compete’s TastyBytes panel called “Location Based Services: It’s Not Just for Mayors” at Towne Stove and Spirits in downtown Boston.

TastyBytes luncheons were created by Compete as a fun, informal way to bring people together for networking and sharing new ideas about how the web, the marketing industry, and current technologies are evolving.

My fellow panelists were:

Mike Schneider, A&G @schneidermike
Aaron Strout, WCG @aaronstrout
Gary Leopold, ISM @garytravels
Nataly Kogan, WHERE @natalykogan

I had a great time listening, learning and speaking about how I see Location Based Services continuing to evolve from the GoodEatsFor.Me perspective and how brands and businesses from the enterprise to the SMB can use these technologies to further their marketing goals. My fellow panelists provided some great insight about how they view the nascent space. The Compete blog has a great overview.

If you are a hospitality brand and are trying to get your head around the space and how these tools can help you, perhaps you should sign up for the GoodEatsFor.Me beta.

"Data is becoming the exhaust product of daily life,” he said. “Yet much of the data we generate is..."

Fri, 06 May 2011 04:04:31 -0400

“Data is becoming the exhaust product of daily life,” he said. “Yet much of the data we generate is inaccessible to us.”

- Michael Zimbalis, company vice president and the Director of The New York Times Company Research and Development Lab

We’re working on changing this.

(via ajitmusic)

Hospitality establishments are increasing their spend on social media in 2011

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 18:39:19 -0500

A recent article by Sarah E. Lockyer in Nation’s Restaurants News indicates that the hospitality industry is focusing a large part of their marketing spend on social media in 2011.

These findings are based on the responses to an online poll of 130 Nation’s Restaurant News subscribers.

From the article:

About 43 percent deemed social media efforts as their largest marketing priority. Thirty-one percent said in-store promotions are key, and about 12 percent deemed local television advertising as their main strategy.

We continue to see large companies outside the hospitality industry shift resources, marketing spend and efforts to consider social media, tools and platforms as a critical part of their business.

My consulting work in Social Business Design with my smart colleagues at The Dachis Group has shown the benefits of this as it relates to the large companies across the enterprise space.

And while large companies have had a few years of experimentation with social media and now view much of this as ‘social business as usual’, I believe that small and medium sized businesses are only just now coming to the realization of the power afforded to them through social media engagement.

It is my belief that the hospitality industry will benefit the most from engagement across social tools and platforms as these tools will help reinforce positive customer experiences, help define the customer base whose online activity can be converted into offline action (think: social graph) and alert hospitality establishments to customer service issues and areas of improvement.

That’s why we continue to work on GoodEatsFor.Me - there is a group of tools/technologies/services out there already that can be used: Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla, Foodspotting, Groupon, blogs, etc.

The trick is pulling the tools together, identifying the needs of your customers and then defining how to activate that customer group based on whatever strategy you want to pursue.
If you want to know more, sign up for our beta.

Foursquare App Gallery: Increasing your reach and emergent outcomes

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 17:13:00 -0500

In early January, we submitted GoodEatsFor.Me to the Foursquare Application Gallery. It was one of the marketing items on our ‘neverending list’ of things to get done. We actually tried in December but ran into some problems submitting the screenshots and editing our application. As of January 4th, a little blurb about us, some screenshots and our logo grace the gallery.

What happened next is a lesson in emergent outcomes and fascinating to me

We immediately received our first non-US beta request from ‘A Touch of Madness Victorian Quaffery’ in Observatory, South Africa.

And immediately thereafter have been inundadted with a lot more US and non-US requests for beta invites. We’re trying to fullfill these request as fast as possible and are happy to oblige (we love our beta users!), but International beta users present new challenges and new development items (non-English characters, broader time zone support, lack of International SMS Twilio support, etc).

But herein lies the customer need and we’re trying to meet it accordingly. So bear with us beta users! We’re trying to move towards you as fast as our little legs will carry us! In the end we’ll figure out how to best serve our customers and improve GoodEatsFor.Me for ALL users, regardless of location. Thanks Foursquare!

Facebook integration, Foursquare Mayor text and email alerts for hospitality establishments

Sun, 30 Jan 2011 00:30:45 -0500

At GoodEatsFor.Me we are constantly iterating and testing out new ideas with our beta customers based on their usage, their feedback and our vision. It is hard work managing between the two of us and our jobs and commitments, but it is worth it.

One of the most requested features for GoodEatsFor.Me was the integration of Facebook mentions of their establishments. We are happy to announce that beta users should see Facebook results populating their dashboards. We are currently providing all mentions of hospitality establishments across public status updates. We will be integrating Facebook ‘Likes’ of establishment pages as well as Facebook Places checkins in the near future.

We are also really excited to announce our new SMS and email notifications system for hospitality establishment owners. The notifications are currently Foursquare focused - but we’re expanding the reach through customer feedback. If you are a beta user of GoodEatsFor.Me, you can now be alerted when the Mayor of your establishment checks in. You can also be alerted when a new mayor is appointed to your establishment.We are processing these alerts using Twilio (SMS) and SendGrid (email).

As far as I know, I have not seen this functionality anywhere else, although I am sure @dens and @naveen will be rolling it out to the Foursquare community really soon!

We’ve got a lot more cool stuff that we’re working on - so stay tuned and keep that great feedback coming!

Restaurants Reach Out to Customers With Social Media

Sun, 23 Jan 2011 11:33:48 -0500

Restaurants Reach Out to Customers With Social Media:

A recent article in the New York Times written by Elizabeth Olson talks about how restaurants are using location based services to connect with their customers.

RESTAURANTS and bars thrive on repeat business, but customers increasingly expect more than just good service, food and drinks. They want to be engaged and entertained, and some food establishments are turning to location-based social media to help keep customers happy and loyal.

The article mentions Loopt and local Boston startup SVNGR and provides a few brief hospitality examples such as SCVNGR’s partnership with Buffalo Wild Wings and Loopt’s partnership with Virgin America and LA based taco trucks.

We are seeing more hospitality establishments starting to use social media to engage with their customer base. And through this engagement there is an increasing amount of data that indicates that online activity is actually promoting offline action.

Sounds great right? A simple equation in which a hospitality establishment can use a location based service(s) and subsequently move customers in and out of their doors.

But this article slightly misses the mark. The examples given are focused on single platforms for these establishments - however the data we have been gathering with GoodEatsFor.Me indicates that customers are engaging with hospitality establishments across multiple social platforms representing roughly different market segments. And this customer activity is often taking place regardless of a hospitality establishment’s participation on these platforms. Overall this signals a huge opportunity that is being missed.

We see customers talking about hospitality establishments on Twitter and Facebook while checking in on Foursquare and Gowalla.

Most establishments don’t know about this activity and that’s why we are currently tracking customer activity on Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla and Facebook (and adding new feeds as they appear.)

Using location based services to run promotions is a great first step - but customers are talking and engaging in multiple ways across multiple platforms. And establishments need to be aware of this activity and use it to connect and offer a better customer experience.

GoodEatsFor.Me can help do this. Drop us a line and sign up for the beta if you’re interested.

How Restaurants are using Social Media

Wed, 24 Nov 2010 18:26:35 -0500

(image via Gourmet Live Blog: credit Melinda Beck)

I stumbled on a great piece a few weeks ago on The Atlantic by Alexis Madrigal entitled “How Some Restaurants Use Social Media to Tailor Fine Dining.”

In reading the article (which is based on a Gourmet Live piece by Sarah Rich), it brought home what we are doing with GoodEatsFor.Me and where we believe the hospitality industry is headed.

The most interesting part is highlighted below:

When John Hartupee found himself eating fast food in the Montreal airport on his way to a weekend dine-around in New York City’s finest restaurants, the irony was not lost on him. From his Blackberry, he tweeted: “Burger King in the airport waiting for my flight to NYC. I’ll consider this my amuse-bouche for Eleven Madison Park!”

The next day, Hartupee glided through the revolving door of Danny Meyer’s palatial restaurant with his girlfriend, leaving the memory of his traveler’s appetizer to evaporate in the Manhattan heat. The maître d’ greeted them, the host swept them off to a crisp, white-clothed table, and a quiet fleet of servers delivered house-filtered mineral water and minimalist square menus.

By the time the real amuse-bouche arrived, they’d been fully transported. They savored a soupçon of sweetbreads, and the table was cleared. Then a second set of small plates arrived, this time concealed under silver domes. The couple sat expectantly as the waiter carefully unveiled their next pristinely constructed bite. But instead of a torchon of foie gras or an heirloom tomato puree, each tiny plate held a single, silver dollar-size lamb burger on a diminutive bun. “We hope these are better than the one you had at the airport,” he said with a wink. Hartupee was dumbfounded.

Had the food police reported his culinary transgression? Were New York chefs omniscient? Reading Hartupee’s expression, the maître d’ approached the table and explained that as part of their daily preparations, the hosts scan social networks for mentions of the restaurant. Hartupee’s tweet presented an opportunity for the staff to personalize his experience, and they took it, figuring that frequent Twitter users aren’t too averse to having strangers know a thing or two about them.

And they were right. Hartupee’s dismay gave way to delight. “This is one of the most quirky yet thoughtful things I have seen a restaurant do,” he wrote afterwards in another online forum. “They took the time to prepare that special item only for us.”

Overall, consumer discussions of hospitality establishments in social channels are taking place with greater frequency. We’re seeing this in the uptick of data we are collecting. It’s great and I don’t think it is a fad that will disappear any time soon.

It is good to see the big guns in the hospitality industry like Danny Meyer start to view the world in this way. They’re starting to catch up with the 4Foods, AJ Bombers, Wow Baos, Eastern Standards and Myers + Changs of the world with regard to their engagement with social channels and technologies.

In the end though - the main purpose of any of this type of engagement is to provide a better customer experience, increase customer loyalty and put more people in seats. GoodEatsFor.Me helps hospitality establishments do just that. If you’re interested, sign up for the beta.

There are a lot of people trying to figure out engagement....

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 03:08:21 -0400

There are a lot of people trying to figure out engagement. Here’s an interesting take by Philly.com

2105:

Getting beyond just pageviews: Philly.com’s seven-part equation for measuring online engagement » Nieman Journalism Lab

One possibility [philly.com’s Chris Meares and others] considered was measuring engagement simply through how many visitors left comments or shared philly.com content on a social media platform. But that method “would lose a lot of people,” Meares said. “A lot of our users don’t comment or share stories, but we have people — 45 percent — [who] come back more than once a day, and those people are very engaged.”

They ultimately decided on seven categories, each with a particular cutoff:

C_i — Click Index: visits must have at least 6 pageviews, not counting photo galleries

D_i — Duration Index: visits must have spend a minimum of 5 minutes on the site

R_i — Recency Index: visits that return daily

L_i — Loyalty Index: visits that either are registered at the site or visit it at least three times a week

B_i — Brand Index: visits that come directly to the site by either bookmark or directly typing www.philly.com or come through search engines with keywords like “philly.com” or “inquirer”

I_i — Interaction Index: visits that interact with the site via commenting, forums, etc.

P_i — Participation Index: visits that participate on the site via sharing, uploading pics, stories, videos, etc.

…

The next step was to track the percentage of overall visits that satisfy each of these categories. What percent of visits to the site lasted at least five minutes? What percent included a comment or other interaction? For instance, in a recent measure of the Click Index, out of 3.9 million total visits, 698,000 were visits where a user clicked through at least six pages — which comes out to a 17.9 percent engagement rate.

Went to Taiwan Cafe in downtown Boston with my brother Tom and...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 01:13:48 -0400

Went to Taiwan Cafe in downtown Boston with my brother Tom and his friends Eric and Jason. I had no idea what we ordered because Jason ordered in Mandarin. It was amazing.

Menu: beef noodle soup, stinky tofu, soup dumplings, duck tongue, spicy pig ear, salt & pepper chicken, sautéed watercress, 1000 year old egg, scallion pancake

"Where there are sensors, there is data - and where there is data there is analysis, actionable..."

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:16:15 -0400

“Where there are sensors, there is data - and where there is data there is analysis, actionable thresholds and functional mashups across data sets and technologies.”

- This is a quote from a great article about MIT’s efforts to create a fiber capable of detecting and emitting sound.

Cool technology - but the quote really reflects how I view GoodEatsFor.Me. Across the disparate communities of Foursquare, Foodspotting, Twitter, Yelp, Facebook and many others….consumers are generating tremendous amounts of data about the hospitality experience. We are analyzing and developing actionable thresholds which are predicated on these functional mashups across these data sets.

The metrics and insights gleaned from this data mashup and presented in an easy to consume dashboard create opportunities to really understand customers - and subsequently interact with them where appropriate.

That’s exciting and one of the many reasons that we are passionate about what we are working on with GoodEatsFor.Me.