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Secret Sauce for Open Tables

A few weeks back I noticed a review on Techcrunch about OpenTable.

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.

The idea of being able to have commercial messaging to customers passing nearby has always had huge business appeal. If my memory is correct it was part of the sizzle around WAP phones in the rush to buy frequencies that never really amounted to much back in 2000.

Not for the first time - technologists had over promised. Still much to the surprise of Telcos SMS messaging really took off since the costs were low enough to encourage all kinds of new uses and since data and voice charges were still too high for most of us.

There is a very good idea that businesses which are set-up to solve a problem often do much better than ones that work around the edges. I've heard this described as the "better to have a pain killer than a bottle of vitamins" approach. (Hat tip to John O'Hara)

Point being the product need/result is instantly understood by a far greater market size and that makes converting marketing activity to sales results a dream. So a very good place to start with understanding or creating a new business is to examine the business model.

Does it solve an easily identified need or need problem and who would the natural customers be? leading on to how do we get to those people and all the usual marketing and operation delivery challenges.

Open Table offers a service that is not readily available outside US, Canada, Mexico or UK at present but see here for a list which shows a small number in other countries and both China and France are listed so they have licensees but no live sites yet. So what are the benefits? (Their description below)

• Save time with automated reservations
• Improve service with a powerful guest database
• Maximize efficiency with table management tool
• Attract repeat business with email marketing
• Join the network that seats 2 million diners monthly
• Gain exposure from more than 75 partners

Most of these benefits come from joining a network and the amplification and network benefits of timely information flow on that circuit. Even though New Zealand is not one of the international territories using OpenTable restaurant booking software it is is only a matter of time before some one here wakes up and sees the opportunity.

I'd guess that there a a large number of restaurants in New Zealand who don't have any real software based booking system. This is a compelling reason to get one very quickly.

In essence pushing bookings data from other systems out to the web should be that difficult and many restaurant application vendors should be able to do this but the real genius is to push to mobile phones. If you have an iPhone or iTouch you can at least download the free application onto your device and have a look at how it all works.

I did this myself a few days ago and checked out some tables in Anchorage Alaska. I was very impressed until I got to the menu section and realised I couldn't "pop" that page out to my Safari browser on the iTouch. The reason for viewing in a web browser is to view in landscape mode and enlarge text so it can be read. Twitterific does this kind of thing very well. On the other hand - if I knew the restaurants and was really a local I would be less interested in the menu than - can I get a booking which is the primary service being offered.

Net result—the Open Table business model is transparent and easy to buy the story so $70m of funding at a time when there is a lot of doom and gloom in the business community. I also couldn't help thinking about Open Source versions of this kind of software and I know that could be done.

Being in New Zealand and Australia I wondered what other kind of project might be around of this kind. There is a list over at secret sauce* and Taggle looks very interesting in this regard

A Taggle is a very low-cost tag that enables consumers, enterprises and governments to use the internet to track the location and status on almost any asset. Taggle Systems (formerly Widentifi) was founded by some of Australia’s leading wireless technology entrepreneurs and is funded by two venture capital firms and private investors.

Secret Sauce has provided a CEO that has led the company through product definition, design and development of a complex hardware and silicon chip solution, business planning and multiple funding rounds.

I remember reading about bicycle security in Amsterdam many years ago and how there were small GPS devices that could be installed in a bike and used to trace them when stolen. Last time I was in Sydney I had my worst ever taxi ride. I needed to go 3 km to a venue and the driver got lost numerous times. The car had GPS but only for security reasons.

Can I suggest the most important asset for a taxi driver especially in Sydney is GPS for navigation!! After 90 mins I finally got to the location but that trip ruined the day totally.

I remember reading about bicycle security in Amsterdam many years ago and how there were small GPS devices that could be installed on a bike and used to trace them when stolen.

An excellent example of going for the vitamin rather than the pain killer.

*Secret Sauce is also a brilliant looking company. On their website they describe themselves as:

Secret Sauce is an entrepreneurial partner for the commercialisation of intellectual property. We find intellectual property that has commercial value, determine the best path to market then generate revenue through licensing deals, IP sales and the creation of new ventures.

I have also been very impressed to reacquaint myself with the people at EveredgeIP who are based in Auckland.

Please we need more Open Tables in ANZAC land—let’s get some more useful applications into the Appstore. Let’s find more easy opportunities around plugging gaps in the network, especially those which solve a problem or need.

4 comments

David MacGregor

2009-05-25 21:16:22

Jason, I really wanted for you to share your insights into the 'Entrepreneur Summit'. (per your intro)

I guess one of my…let's just call them 'issues'…with the term 'entrepreneur' is that it defines nothing. If you wrote 'entrepreneur' on your declaration form for entry into most soveriegn nations on the planet the customs officials would, and quite rightly, in my opinion, snap on their rubber gloves and prepare for a cavity search. The problem is that they would, most like be searching in the wrong cavity. I would gel up and probe between your ears. I suspect I would only find a legume on the brink of putrefaction formerly identifiable as a pea.

New Zealand has to stop this rot.

Just because you were successful and lucky enough as a maker of Tiki shaped bottle openers hand carved by plastic injection molding machines in Guangdong doesn't mean I am in the slightest bit interested in your opinion of macro-economics.

I was utterly gobsmacked that such a lurid event could be summoned. I was not, however, in the least bit surprised that the gathering of the self proclaimed would deliver up…I forget.

I was, also gobsmacked (my apologies for repeating myself, …but I was) that no less than Graham Wall was the poster boy for the event. Graham - I admit - is a loveable rogue, but rogue he is - failed adman, car salesman and real estate seller - a broker of 'what takes your fancy', the personification of Arthur Daily.

Folks, listen to me. Positive thinking will no more cure the economy than it will cancer. Great enthusiasm has led millions to their premature and untimely deaths in the history of humanity. Think Agincourt, Gallipoli, sub-prime mortgages.

Schumpeter was the economist who first described entrepreneurship - but he called them wild spirits. I sense nothing wild or spirited from the the besuited (albeit, sometimes, tie-less) attendees who gathered at the Summit. Most were there for self preservation/promotion/lunch.

And I worry that a bicycle track as the economic miracle is little better than a unicycle track.

We need many paths and many voices - not just those of conservatives who can afford the price of attendance as dumb-ass 'entrepreneur summits'

Don't forget when you scale a mountain the top is the halfway point. I wonder how many of those knobs will come out alive?

What do you think?

Ben

2009-05-26 14:38:16

David, the only industries where negativity beats positivity are law and psychiatry. If your in neither of those perhaps your bitter about the fact that your whole industry is going under and you don't know what to do about it.
Meanwhile many entrepreneurs are cashing in on the change and a new age is emerging.
Keep telling yourself that positive thinking won't help and you'll get the outcome your heading for. those who know otherwise will continue to create whatever future they choose.

Ben

PS The summit was free and those who attended did so to support either the organisers or the country. I don't agree with all the ideas or think that it was populated by only entrepreneurs. But I'm can't let your negativity go without comment. Idealog, I am dissapointed in you.

David MacGregor

2009-05-27 00:02:56

Ben,

While the 'entrepreneurs' were at the love-in, voting for second rate ideas others were getting on with business and making real things happen. I see it first hand every day.

The best the throng could come up with was 'Give it a go, bro' …give me a break. kiwis are already 'giving it a go' the pages of Idealog have been full of their stories since it launched.

More 'ideas' isn't the problem. Steady political and economic leadership will go a long way further than hokey feel good slogans. It is hardly surprising that characters like Dave Walden back an idea that will result in cash for Kool Aid propaganda.

It was also further proof that great ideas don't come out of committees and voting.

It seems odd that we would even need a summit in the era a crowd sourcing. Set up a site and invite the entire population to contribute.

At the very least the ideas can't be worse than Give it a go Bro. (is it only men - bros who should 'give it a go'?)

I'm positive about New Zealanders who are giving it a go. I'm dog on the Summit. There must be an equation that demonstrates the inverse relationship between group groping and getting things done.

I dedicate this response to the inspirational doers John Britten and
Bert Munroe (Whom I'm betting never attended an event like The Entrepreneur Summit')

Give it a rev Trev.

Jason Kemp

2009-06-12 16:45:05

Thanks David and Ben for your comments. I couldn't comment directly on the summit as I wasn't there.

Sorry if I was a bit oblique about that. I do meet really interesting and creative business people all the time though and they are just out there doing it.
If they go to a conference it is probably going to be a big one in the U.S for a niche market like Ponoko did a year or two back.

I do think there is a risk that we expect ideas to come from the usual suspects and miss some really great ones because they are outside the radar.

For example - Wellingtons Instinct are huge in the open source world but perhaps not that well known in NZ.

I also think we need to have better follow through with projects. A good example of this is the fxbike project.

The most read page on this website is the "Pimp my bike" feature on FXbikes. That project is a few years down the track in the U.S now and deserves more support than it gets.

There are plenty of others as well but they are not always on the guest list and perhaps they should be.

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