Technology and Marketing

Restaurants take heart: change seems to be coming.  After two years of declining growth and slowing spending, it appears that consumers are finally going to spend more this holiday season, not less. A flock of reports have been circulating in the retail and food service worlds pointing to positive growth …

“Favorite Places On Google” is a new feature that provides maps, directions, reviews, and photos of 100,000 businesses across the U.S.  Many of these businesses are restaurants, and that’s significant because eventually users will be able to post reviews and other information about your restaurant and have it display on …

So, have you jumped on the Twitter bandwagon yet?  Or are you sick and tired of hearing about tweets, tweeting, and all other variations of bird noises?  Are you wondering what the heck I’m talking about? For those of you who answered “yes” to the last question, you’ve got some …

Think of your restaurant as a 5 gallon bucket.  Every day you fill that bucket with customers.  Sometimes there’s a steady flow, sometimes it’s just a trickle, and sometimes it seems like a flood.  No matter what kind of day it is, every customer flowing through your doors grades their …

The Stew blog, written by the Chicago Tribune’s food beat staff, posted an interesting article recently talking about the little perks that make a restaurant meal a more pleasant experience. Yet as great as these perks are, they seem pretty generic – best practices that any restaurant worth its salt …

The technology needed to allow a person to sit in one room and communicate visually and verbally with a person in another room somewhere else far away has been around for some time now.  It’s been imagined in the movies for decades, going back to Star Trek all the way …

Motorola recently released a case study highlighting the latest in restaurant POS system technology: handheld, wireless ordering systems for servers.  The handheld device is about twice as big as a BlackBerry, and connects directly into the restaurant’s POS software via a wireless connection. The case study focuses on Sam’s Chowder …

Kansas City based casual dining concept Houlihan’s has been around for almost 40 years.  In that time they’ve seen the rise of the casual trend and a lot of ups and downs.  In the early 2000’s Houlihan’s was seeing more down than up, and a new management team was brought …

Marketing your restaurant online is a concept that’s relatively new to the food service industry as a whole, and is still a foreign concept to many restaurateurs.  This is not helped by the speed with which marketing channels online are moving.  By the time you set up a Facebook page, …

The unveiling of the iPad earlier this month left a lot of people wondering what all the hype was all about.  For many, the mini-notebook looks and feels like an oversized iPhone without the ringtones.  But as the iPad hits the market and continues to sell well, more and more …