Current Project

[Rubino]

Hi guys,

I'd appreciate it if you would take a look at the following and provide some constructive feedback on something I am currently working on.
This following is very broad brush and some details are missing - but essentially it's complete.

Technical Background
I'm currently working on what is essentially an asset management engine.  It's a generic engine that allows temporary assignment of assets to be rented for pre-defined periods.
The first incarnation of the engine will be a system designed around restaurants - specifically allowing restaurants to find/attract booking during the quieter/more competitive days of the week.
Restaurants in this context are the suppliers.  Customers are users who are visiting and looking for an offer.

Business Proposal background
Restaurants are expensive places to run and they need to ensure they have enough booking or covers - to ensure that they are in profit. 
Like many businesses their main expenditure is premises, people and high-value stock (which for restaurants would be things like wine).  While one of the main components that generate income is food - it's generally not one of their main expenses.

Cities have multiple regions or districts.  Restaurants tend to deliver a type of cuisine (Italian, Chinese, etc).

The interface for both customers and suppliers will be simple and intuitive to use and operate.  It is important that suppliers can quickly, easily and intuitively interact with the site.
The interface for customers should be clean & bold.  It should feel interactive and "current" with modern internet standards.  It should be clean and usable by those in the target age/income brackets.
The target customer audience are those in their early 20's to the mid 60's and it's intended to be use by city residents as well as people visiting (tourists).

The supplier interface should additionally provide them with business tools that allow them to manage their product in the content of the market they are in.  Essentially this means providing some business analysis tools that allows them to see how their offering profiles against others in the same market. 

Initially the system would cover the area & district where I live (Barcelonetta in Barcelona) but it's designed to cover any number of cities and any number of districts within a city.
The site will be multilingual in design and support all European languages.  Ideally each city will be in both English and the local native language.  This would allow the site to be usable by tourists as well as locals.
The design is such that I expect other cities to be covered and managed by people other than me - as such the administration of the site would allow the city owner to manage their city themselves.
They would be able to have an "overview" of their city in terms of coverage, clients, users, etc.


Business Proposal
The system I am developing will be a web based application - essentially a website - that allows restaurants to connect to customers to attract customers throughout the week with specials aimed at generating more business. 
Initially the website would be accessible via the internet, mobile phone or WebTV - all known as the "Web Interface".  Later the website would be accessible via SMS and telephone (via touch dialling).

Customers would visit the website and search for restaurants in their neighbourhood (or city region), a type of cuisine, or within a budget range.  The system would allow customers to book a table through the website.

Restaurants would manage their offers by logging in and using the web interface. They would be able to create offers based on the size of the table (i.e. for 4 or 6 people), a theme (romantic meal, etc), day of the week, etc
They would be able to make offers which wouldn't initially be visible and to enable/disable offers.  They would be able to create an offer and using the business management tools - see how the offer compares to others within their market sector - against those currently known on the site - and other restaurants that the site has harvested from other internet sources.  (This means that the system will connect to other websites and profile restaurants for the purpose of allowing clients to profile their offering against the current markets in their city).

The system would allow customers to book a table at a restaurant - and the system would send a confirmation SMS both to the customer and to the restaurant.
Users would be able to "opt in" to specials via email/SMS/RSS from a specific restaurant or from anything that is searchable via the search interface (cuisine, region, etc).

The design also allows for a "White Label" approach - where restaurants can make their own website which will run and "hook into" the engine.  This allows them to have their own web presence (their own domain name, theme, design, etc) which uses the information that has already entered for a delta cost above the service cost.

City Financial model
This is a tricky one and I'm not set on the best approach yet.
The options are for a per-booking fee or a period fee (monthly, 3 monthly, annual) and probably payable by the restaurant.
Income would also be generated from the "White Label" implementation and would be an annual cost. 

"Master" financial model
For me this is clearer cut and the aim is to reward those who put effort and time into making their city successful.
10-15% of the income generated by the city would be used for marketing for that city and then city owners would be entitled to 75% of the remaining income generated by their city.
While the marketing budget is fairly small by industry standards - the architecture of the site is designed so that it is self-promoting in an internet sense.  This means that the site is designed for optimal SEO and SER.

The remaining 25% of each city would go to a central pool. 

The central pool would be used for operating costs to pay for hosting, general marketing.  Of any remaining income 75% would go to the designer & maintainer (i.e. me .
The remaining 25% would be divided up, every 3 months, and paid to city owners.



I know many of you are business focussed - so don't be too harsh!

[Warcold]

already dropped some things ingame, but first of all: is this part of the forum public? if so, move it. you dont want your idea nicked, do you?

another thing that pops into mind now is that you may want to offer different levels of options restaurant owners have to participate. as i mentioned ingame, not everyone wants lot of options cause it can be cumbersome to manage. so besides offering a real CMS, also offer the option to just be mentioned in the system: name, sort of food, adress, phonenumber
2nd: a lot of restaurants dont have the system to accept/handle online reservations, so also offer the option to call the restaurant through the system.
3rd: customers: a lot of ppl dont have mobile internet yet (i know i dont) and i guess the ppl who have are predominantly male. keep this in mind.

besides the nagging: sounds like a great system! 

I will go over your writeup again later for more of ideas to pop up

[Rubino]

Thanks for the feedback - keep it coming guys and feel free to chip in with any ideas/suggestions and topic related random thoughts.

There's no other place that would be suitable on the forums - and I don't really want to pollute the restricted forum (eve) with just an idea.

Levels of participation is a good idea - and I'll modify the approach to ACL to reflect this - which essentially means as you expand your use of the system - more options will open up to you.
Keep in mind that the aim is that this system will generate income - so a balance needs to be achieved between supplying information vs generating revenue.

The idea behind using SMS as a delivery mechanism of bookings means they don't need a computer or specialised eq   Additionally during setup they would be able to specify a number of tables available - and the system could track what has been booked.  This would allow a simple mechanism of ensuring overbooking is less likely.  I also anticipate enabling "reply to" sms's - which would allow a supplier to send/reply to an SMS to open up more tables, enable/disable an offer, etc.  The exact abilities are open - but the technology for this has been implemented and I've implemented such an approach on other projects.

Aye - the mobile internet is still fairly small in it's takeup - but it's something that is slowly and steadily growing.  Additionally the implementation of this is in essence "styistic" - which means that it's a presentation layer process.  The underlying system is the same - it's just about really keeping the interface "clean & compliant" for mobile devices.

[Warcold]

Keep in mind that the aim is that this system will generate income - so a balance needs to be achieved between supplying information vs generating revenue.

'Short' response:

I worked at a company that makes same sort of product, but aimed at careers (choice of university, choice of jobs and such). Universities/companies buy room at the website and the customers have free access. One major point is that you have to cover a big part (if not all) of the spectrum to make your product useful and thus attractive.
The company (check out http://masters.qompas.nl/en/ for english part of the site aimed at master courses at universities) decided to offer full spectrum of courses available with more options available for unis that actually pay money (incl pictures/movies and such). Universities that dont pay money are also listed, but with the data taken from the website by Qompas itself. This costs quite some money, but you get a better product and thus is used more, making it more attractive to participate in.
So in your case: only 3 participating restaurants in a city will make your product not really worthwhile to customers, and thus neither to the restaurants. -> no/low income

So maybe entering all restaurants in a city in your system would be best (copy-paste from existing sites), maybe with just stating name and adress of restaurants not participating; name, adress, phonenumber at lowest entry level (costing very little, say 10 euros a month), and onward in 2 or 3 more entrylevels.
What Qompas also uses to make participation more attractive are things like putting paying customers at top of list when searching for restaurants.
Qompas actually had ideas to make exactly such a product years ago, but that was in the days when it wasnt web based yet. They offered their product on cd-roms in those days. They also had cd-roms for lease-cars and for ski-hollidays, but keeping it up to date and distribution was very difficult. Eventually they decided to focus on career: highschool - bachelor - master - job - mba-degree, with cross references.

[Rubino]

Aye - extracting the information is something I've considered and something the wench keeps reminding me to look into

The main issue with extracting - isn't so much the extraction process itself - I have an approach that I've used before and it's fairly effective and adaptable.  It's more the problem of other others running other cities.
For each datasource - the extraction process needs to be customised - and whille this isn't difficult - it can be fiddly.
Unless I can come up with an approach that is intuitive for others to use - it will mean my time/effort.  When things are small scale - this isn't an issue - but as takeup grows and expands - it will become more of an issue.

I have some current data sources for the information - and I'll start with those and see if I can come up with something that's user friendly. 

Placement in search results is a good idea - where ranking is optimised based on a number of factors - subscriptions being one.  I'd also like to incorporate some kind of social aspect - which encourages people to leave feedback and user generated content. 

Longer term I'm looking to implement a console type device that would provide more of a booking management application to owners.  Things that would be included would be iCal/Outlook calender management, etc.

Thanks for the link - I'll check it out.

[Warcold]

oh and err... did you do some kind of marketing research? like... very simple: pop by in some restaurants and ask if they'd be interested?

[Rubino]

Aye - I'd done some local canvasing and talked with people here both in the "biz" and consumers.