The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘restaurants’

One of the biggest sources of new searches in the coming years for Google will come from mobile devices, which is why it is attacking mobile on multiple fronts—with Android phones, mobile apps, and mobile search across multiple devices. One of its more impressive efforts lately has been around voice search. Not every phone has a touchscreen or a full keyboard, and some languages simply aren’t keyboard-friendly, and that is where voice search comes in extra handy.

Google already has impressive voice search capabilities on the iPhone, Android, and other phones in English. But today, it is extending voice search to Mandarin Chinese and to Nokia S60 series phones. There are so many different accents and nuances to spoken Chinese, which is the most popular language in the world, that getting the speech-to-text good enough to return relevant searches is a huge challenge.

I don’t speak Chinese so I can’t evaluate how good a job Google does with Chinese voice search (perhaps some of our readers who know Mandarin can give it a whirl and tell us their impressions in comments). But I am starting to use Google’s English voice search, even though I have an iPhone. The speech recognition in English is surprisingly good.

For instance, just this weekend, driving around Bedford, NY, I remembered that Richard Gere has an inn and restaurant up there, but couldn’t remember the name. Typing in “Richard Gere restaurant” into the Google Maps app on the iPhone returned nothing, so I closed that and clicked on the Google Mobile Apps icon. When I selected search, it encouraged me to try Voice Search. Maybe it always did that, but it was the first time I had noticed it. Already frustrated at that point and not wanting to retype my query, I tried saying “richard gere restaurant.” Sure enough, it understood me and delivered The Bedford Post Inn and Restaurants as the first result.

If Google can get its Chinese language voice search to be that good, China could become its largest source of mobile search queries.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

One of the big problems with starting a new service that relies on user submitted data is getting people to actually use it — nobody is going to routinely boot up your app if they don’t have an incentive to do so. One way to tackle this problem is by working the service into a game, which is a technique that seems to be working quite well for Foursquare, a service that makes it easy to find your friends. GraffitiGeo is a new Y Combinator funded startup launching tonight that’s looking to combine similar gameplay elements to take on a different space: restaurant reviews.

At its core GraffitiGeo allows users to leave brief reviews of restaurants, or for those too lazy to do that, to simply leave a ‘thumbs up’ or ‘thumbs down’ — it’s like a highly condensed version of Yelp, or a “Digg for the world”. These reviews and votes can be cast from the site’s iPhone app or from the service’s homepage. The homepage also features a stream of the latest comments to come in from other users, as well as a profile for each restaurant in the system that includes all of its votes and comments. There’s also a nifty feature that lets you view a heatmap of your current region, so you can quickly figure out the hot spots in town.

The gameplay in GraffitiGeo is a bit more complex than that found in Foursquare, which gives you points for checking in but doesn’t really let you do anything with them. With GraffitiGeo, you earn points for every action you take, be it voting on a restaurant or leaving a brief comment. Once you’ve reached a certain point threshold, you can use those points to start a ‘mob’, which you can invite your friends to join. Mobs allow friends to pool their points, which can then be used to acquire territory, which corresponds to actual city blocks. Whenever someone votes on one of the restaurants on the block, the mob gets some street cred too. It’s definitely going to be confusing at first, but it also brings a team element to gameplay — something that Foursquare lacks. You can read more about the mob game here.

GraffitiGeo is also working on a second related iPhone app that combines the site’s data with augmented reality — in effect, it turns your iPhone into a viewfinder for looking up restarurant info (see the video below for a demo). Just hold the iPhone as you would a camera and point it in the direction of the restaurant in question, and an overlay featuring GraffitiGeo comments will hover over it. It’s very cool (we’ve seen a number of other AR apps that are on the way), though we’ll have to wait a while longer to try it out.

GraffitiGeo has some good ideas (especially with the AR app), but it still has its work cut out for it. For one, Yelp is going to prove a very tough competitor — it already has a vast amount of data, and while it may be annoying having to sift through long reviews at times, I don’t think people find it annoying enough to stop using that site. The startup also has some work to do on the iPhone app and the service’s homepage, both of which are functional but could still use some polish.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Dot com meltdown survivor and restaurant reservation software company OpenTable had been a rumored IPO candidate for a while. Still, it shocked many when it finally filed its intention to debut on the Nasdaq back in January. What? Does this company just have a thing for market meltdowns?

There’s still no word on when OpenTable will actually price, but so far, the IPO is still on, signaled by the company filing its first quarter earnings with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Friday. What’s more: It had an OK first quarter. Revenues increased from $13.2 million a year ago to just under $16 million, and the quarter had a modest $366,000 profit. Last year’s first quarter came with an $87,000 loss.

Now that the markets have recovered, I’m betting on a pricing later this year. That’s good for me: I’ve been promised a sit down with the CEO once the quiet period is over. (Send me your burning questions!) And it’s certainly a much better thing for OpenTable’s very patient investors and venture capital as a whole. The National Association of Venture Capitalists is so concerned about the lack of IPOs in venture land that it recently laid out an ambitious proposal to change the rules.

But OpenTable is hardly an Internet homerun. It’s frequently described as a consumer Internet company, when really it’s a software-as-a-service company. The good news –for this moment in time—is that that means Open Table doesn’t have an ad model. It actually has paying customers in the form of restaurants using its reservation software and paying it monthly subscription fees.

But what software-as-a-service companies gain in predictability of revenues, they lose in big blowout quarters. In other words: Don’t expect this IPO to set the world on fire. Netsuite—a company with a far bigger addressable market, a better growth rate and more than three times OpenTable’s annual revenues– hasn’t fared well since its 2007 IPO, and so far Salesforce is one of the only SAAS companies to get to $1 billion in annual revenues. A business like OpenTable’s takes a lot of investment in sales and marketing to close a modest deal, and that will be harder as the company strives for more international reach.

But there is one way OpenTable could use this IPO to its advantage: Forget international expansion for now and use the IPO proceeds and new stock currency to acquire a real consumer Internet company or at least some star UI talent.

I’ve long criticized OpenTable for catering only to the restaurants, and not caring much at all for the actual diners. Just look at the so-called loyalty rewards system: You practically have to eat out every day of your life to get a $20 dining voucher, and points expire without any notice. They’d do better not to have a loyalty program at all. In short, for diners OpenTable has been a convenience but not much more. And since many restaurants call you to verify the reservation and insist you call them back, it’s not really even that convenient. Can you imagine having to call United after you’ve already bought your ticket online or call Amazon to verify you really wanted to buy that book?

But increasingly OpenTable seems to be inching in the user-friendly direction, and it turns out being the only player who knows exactly where you’ve dined, when, and what availability there is in restaurants near you at every moment can be a pretty formidable advantage.

Consider user reviews, a feature idea OpenTable only recently launched. My initial reaction was it’d be near impossible for OpenTable to compete with Yelp’s edge, community and UI savvy. But unlike Yelp, OpenTable knows where you’ve dined, when. Like NetFlix or Amazon can prompt you to review a rental or purchase as soon as the transaction has occurred, OpenTable now sends out an email asking for your thoughts. With some UI help and a one-click-from-the-email rating system, the company could get people in the habit of quick reviews and build a library of your tastes, tailoring recommendations in other cities for you, or even sell that data back to restaurants. It shouldn’t aim to get the same depth of reviews that Yelp gets. Instead, it should aim for breadth. A simple, one-click yay or nay on every place you dine that no one else can replicate, because no one else owns the reservation engine.

Here’s another edge that isn’t new, but was new to me: Because OpenTable’s software is at the host stand, diners can search for real-time reservations. Say it’s a Friday night in San Francisco and you’re wondering what restaurant you can get into in ten minutes. Before you’d have to call around blindly asking how long the wait was. On OpenTable you can search for immediate openings in a given neighborhood. Most online reservations sites have an hour cut off because the systems have to sync together. But OpenTable is the restaurant’s system. It’s the first time I’ve seen OpenTable actually do something for me as a diner that I couldn’t have done any other way, and the new location-aware iPhone app makes that functionality all the more powerful.

These are baby steps to the applications OpenTable could develop on top of its in-restaurant software edge if it hired some crack consumer Internet talent. Here’s hoping the IPO is a means to that end, and not just the final destination for a company that’s mostly spent the last decade playing it safe.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors