Last week, Foursquare announced its latest Explore feature, which leveraged its 1.5 billion checkins into personalized recommendations for users. And as if that wasn’t enough to lure hungry urbanites to its full-service platform, starting today, Foursquare will publish pricing menus for over 250,000 local businesses across 13,000 markets in the U.S. whether it’s a spa, salon or bun-jee jumping adventure.
Not only will the popular check-in app display this information, but pricing menus will soon be available on the hundreds of apps powered by Foursquare’s API. And these menus, delivered by NYC startup SinglePlatform, will be kept updated in realtime. For now, menus are available at foursquare.com and m.foursquare.com, and will be coming soon to all of Foursquare’s apps.
After spending 10-years leading online delivery service SeamlessWeb, Wiley Cerilli launched SinglePlatform in January 2010 to ease restaurants into the next course of Internet marketing and social media. Restaurants provide SinglePlatform with their information like menus, photos, events and specials through an easy-to-use portal and SinglePlatform updates this across their hundreds of publishing partners including hotels, city guides, restaurant review sites and application developers.
SinglePlatform is a win for both publishers and local businesses. And Foursquare is just the start. SinglePlatform will be announcing its complete core publisher network in a month’s time, which already includes mega partners such as The New York Times. The service currently includes 400,000 menus covering over 13,000 cities in the US, with international venues coming soon. “We’re leveling the playing field for local businesses,” explains Cerilli, the startup’s Founder and CEO. “Now, they can go to one platform for just $400 a year and have their profiles across all of these different sites and mobile applications.”
SinglePlatform has completed two rounds of fundings for a total of $4.45 million, backed by First Round Capital, DFJ Gotham, New World Ventures, RRE and the founders of Seamless.
image credit: ssuaphotos via shutterstock
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