| Story Views | |
| Now: | |
| Last Hour: | |
| Last 24 Hours: | |
| Total: | |
Order Dinner Without Leaving Facebook
In SoMeIT (Social Media Information Technology), we are fully dedicated to satisfying all of your web needs, integrating your business to social networks.
Facebook’s purchase of social-gifting app Karma on Friday shows not only that the company is looking to beef up its mobile services, but that it’s also looking to diversify its revenue stream beyond advertising.
Karma alerts you when your friends have milestones approaching, and makes it easy for you to send them a gift, even if you don’t have their address. Ordr.in, a Google Ventures-backed startup, has a similar strategy, but addresses a need more primal than what to get a friend for her graduation from college: what to have for dinner.
“Food is inherently social,” David Bloom, CEO of the five-employee New York City shop, said in an interview. “It lends itself well to Facebook.”
At its heart, Ordr.in is an API upon which different technologies can be built. Restaurants share their menus with Ordr.in and pay a commission every time they receive an order through the application. The app can sit on a restaurant’s fan page or website and, as its tagline suggests, it will help restaurants “turn fans into customers.” That has been a big criticism of Facebook by companies that have set up brand pages but haven’t been able to monetize them.
When a person orders using Ordr.in, the app pushes the order to their Timeline, presumably prompting friends to say “You know, sushi sounds good righ about now.” The app offers access to the verbs “Crave” and “Eat” so users can supplement their feelings about a particular restaurant beyond the usual “Like.”
The menu choices are slim, for now – there are, for example, no restaurants listed in Boston – and even Bloom says his firm has some distance to go before it perfects the model.
“We like it, but we’re definitely not satisfied with it,” Bloom said. “With Facebook today, you don’t know what is going to work. You can’t just take an offline shopping experience and fit it into Facebook. Dmall companies like ours are nimble and able to adapt. We’re going to figure it out.”
The restaurant industry has traditionally been behind the curve in adopting new technologies. That may be changing: At the recent National Restaurant Association convention in Chicago, a four-day survey of the 59,000 attendees indicated social media the third most important issue for restauranteurs.
“The stereotype of restaurants as technologicals laggard is often true,” Bloom said, “in large part because the day-to-day activities of the business are not conducted on a computer screen. They know this is important, and they’re getting smarter about technology. I think we’re going to see a lot of catching up over the next few years.”
source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/readwriteweb/~3/dGHbeZa2eIQ/order-dinner-without-leaving-facebook.php
Source:
