Nate and I connect for 11 minutes on a blitzkrieg of possibilities on the latest installment of This Week in Restaurant Technologies. We found some great articles to highlight for restaurant marketers to give some thought to:
- Within the Yelp app, users can now see which retailers accept Bitcoin for payment. Listen, I’m no old-timer and if you know me or the very concept of NextRestaurants, you know I’m all-in on the future. But this is a crazy use of Yelp’s employees’ time.
- Square allows users to pre-order and pay with restaurants. While Yelp focuses on the year 2030, Square is focused on 2014 and 2015. Great move by the company to speed up and push the adoption of pay in advance via mobile.
- And while we’re on the payment kick, how about this: Amazon will let you add items to your shopping cart via tweet! Is this aimed at restaurants? Uh no, not yet. But it’s not 2030 (to keep picking on Yelp here). I’m huge on innovators making it more frictionless to pay through means other than in-person credit card or cash. I’m a fan of mobile payments, but would love to be able to pay via text or heck yeah, I’ll pay by tweet.
- Finally, while this has NOTHING to do with the payment theme, Food Genius has an important announcement to make: There’s no such thing as national menu trends at restaurants!! There are trends that grab hold locally, to be sure. But their deep data suggests ain’t nothing happening when it comes to trends starting in NYC, for instance, and scurrying westward. You can also read the Food Genius post on this.
Would love to hear your take on any of these news items. You can always ping us individually via email, comments, and or Twitter with the hashtag #TWIRT as your trusty sidekick.
