Restaurants aren’t exactly known for serving up tech-savvy. While many have partnered with local e-deal start ups or have jumped into the group buying phenomenon, there are those that are still left in the dust, struggling to keep their menu up to date on MenuPages.
To be fair, it’s a lot of information to keep updated on a lot of different websites and mobile apps- Yelp, Facebook, Twitter, MenuPages, ChowHound, OpenTable, AroundMe, Foursquare; the list is endless.
In January 2010, SeamlessWeb entrepreneur Wiley Cerilli launched SinglePlatform 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 it across their hundreds of publishing partners including hotels, city guides, restaurant review sites and application developers.
“Nearly 89% of consumers have researched a restaurant online prior to dining there, however only a small percentage of websites have up-to-date restaurant information,” Cerilli says. “Restaurants recognize that they need to have a full digital strategy but don’t know where to start.”
In essence, the site acts as a B2B service to help restaurants catch up with the digital age. SinglePlatform monetizes by creating unique phone numbers for all its restaurant partners. When a customer calls that number SinglePlatform receives $1 and the site’s publisher takes a percentage. Cerilli believes that $1 is worth it to restaurants whose info would otherwise be out of date or not online, meaning they would miss the sale altogether.
SinglePlatform recently locked down $1.2 Million in Series A funding, provided by First Round Capital with VC partners RRE Ventures, DFJ Gotham and Gunderson Dettmer. Co-investors include both Seamless Web’s founders and Steve Savad the founder of Restaurant.com.
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