By developing custom iPhone and Android apps for your restaurant business, you can open the doors for some of the best promotional strategies.

You can develop various mobile applications to help your restaurant business attract more customers within a shortest time. You just have to be more innovative in this to offer convenience and facility to your customers through your mobile apps.

Custom restaurant apps give you 24/7 access to your customer base. This can not only help in increasing your business as compared to your competitors, but will also increase your customer loyalty.

Here are a few ideas for custom mobile applications to help your restaurant business attract more customers:

1. In-App Reservations

Customers can be provided with convenient feature within your restaurant app which allows them to make reservation, receive confirmation through email with date, time and party size and also turn-by-turn directions to your restaurant location.

This will allow your customers to make reservations anytime convenient to them. Your customers can even call you with an easy one-touch button on the landing page of your custom app.  

2. Digital Menus

You can impress your customers with a “digital menu”. Definitely your customers will astounded by the way they are served by you before their welcome drink. By offering them a facility to choose their menu on iPad or tablets, you provide them a sophisticated way to choose their dishes and meals.   

These types of apps allow then restful attention, as they can easily search for their favorite cuisines and dishes. This digital menu can be simple, yet strategically stimulating and directional.

You can help your customers with suggestive themes with a segregated layout that can work wonders for you. Imagine placing a screen in front of them, which offers a simple selection module with a separate section for both non-vegetarian and vegetarian and other cuisines!  

3. Google Maps-Based Apps

You can integrate Google map in your restaurant app to help customers in reaching your restaurant or its different branches using Google map.

You will also be tagged and will show up in results when somebody will search for the restaurants or keys in some word that suits your parameters in the chosen locality.

4. Promotional Apps

You can interact with your customers directly and keep them updated 24/7 with promotional offers, discount offers and special offerings. You can also encourage your customers to refer more people and offer them auto generated privilege offers and loyalty points.

5. Update Apps

You can share amazing videos and pictures of your restaurant. Party space, events, celebrity visits, food, hospitality, occasional decorations and food can be shared with the guests and customers.   

With mobile apps, it is also possible to share chef’s special advice, video testimonials, information on different branches, proclaimed services, facilities and birthday celebrations that are available as a part of your extended services with the help of intuitive videos.   

6. Payment Apps

You can make payment by your customers easy with a module that interactively asks them to pay their bill through card or cash. With the help of mobile apps, you can offer them loyalty points, cross-promotional offers and additional privileges.

Your customers would love this even more when they would get innovative features such as comparison of their current bill with the bill that they would have paid if they had visited your restaurant during happy hours or other schemes, or a simple tip calculator!

© Global World Tech
 

Image: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Today technology is growing rapidly and changing faster than ever. Today 96 percent of Americans use mobile phones not only for communications but also for texting and browsing the Internet. The popularity of smart phones and tablets is increasing day-by-day and they have now become very user friendly.

Today there is a high demand for innovative mobile applications that can be easily run on various types of smart phones. With this, mobile applications have dramatically changed the way business is done by enhancing their connectivity with companies and brand more than ever.

This has also resulted in a much better and rich user experience. If you are interested in providing that cutting edge to your business, it is very important for you to use the latest technology to your advantage by including the mobile web application development in your marketing plans, as this can go a long way in boosting not only your image, but sales as well.  

Here are some benefits of mobile web application development for your business:

1. Serve Your Business In A Much Better Way

Are you interested in going paperless? Well, it is now possible as you can create a application that showcases your merchandise and inventory. This helps eliminate any need to bring catalogs and forms to client meetings.

You can stay in touch with your employees and keep them updated on any sudden changes in schedule and notify them according about your plans.  

2. Increase Brand Awareness And Exposure

Mobile apps are not only for big businesses. Both large and small brands can opt for the mobile web application development to create innovative applications and then use them for marketing and creating buzz about their new arrivals or existing products.

Mobile web applications are much better as an option than the mobile web as mobile websites lack the click ability. Mobile applications can help you in engaging your current customers base, and to tap new customers who are more curious to know as to what all this hype is about.       

3. Ability To Ascertain Location Of Users

With the help of location based services you can easily track your customer’s peak traffic time and check-ins. Some services such as Yelp and Foursquare now allow you to offer promotions and coupons to your customers who check-in to your site.

They also collect their demographic details. This can assist you a great deal in customizing your ad campaigns according to your target market.   

4. Improved Productivity

People these days are very busy and rarely have time to sit on their computers to browse internet for information or to buy products. With mobile application, you can easily cut down on the time taken to complete any task.

These applications make it easy for your customer to have hassle free access to their account, order products, request quotes, or remain in touch with you. All this can be done by using just one mobile application on their mobile phone. You already know-time is money!  

5. Push notifications

The simplest way to advertise is by using push notifications. When you have plans to offer coupons, discounts or want to promote some event, you can use push notifications for sending alerts directly to your customers mobile phone.

You can also use them to keep your customers updated on anything latest about your business.    

With huge emphasis on mobile devices everywhere, you can make your business stand out amidst intense competition by creating innovative mobile web applications that will take your business to the next level within days.

© Global World Tech

Image: David Castillo Dominici / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Mobile applications are increasingly being recognized by marketers as pretty powerful tools to help solidify relationships with customers and create very loyal followers in the process.

It is however important to realize that mobile applications development is not as easy as it may sound and it requires special skills and a deep understanding of exactly how it works best for your interests in reaching out to your customers.

To start with it is important to recognize the unique advantages that mobile phone applications bring to the table. People usually carry their mobile phones wherever they go.

What this means is that as a business you can get immediate access to your market and customers. What’s more is that most people will access and read messages received on their mobile devices.

This is very different from web messages where it is becoming an increasing challenge to get even a small percentage of the folks who receive the message to actually open it.

The most effective way to use mobile phone applications to create loyal customers is to offer additional useful services usually for free. It should be the kind of service that will always help your customers remember you and your main line of paid products and services.

This is important in a world that is increasingly crowded by too many advertising messages all competing for our attention at the same time. Ads are hurled at the consumer every waking moment from so many different mediums and outlets.

People (read, your customers) now tend to shut out most of these messages and the result is that advertising is much less effective than what it used to be. With mobile applications development you have a unique opportunity to reach and engage folks who are increasingly shutting out the advertising “noise” that is now everywhere around them.

The big challenge is getting a large chunk of your audience to opt in to your mobile phone application because it is all permission based and you do not want to ruin the reputation of your brand by intruding on people with services and messages that they have not requested.

However if you have a useful application this should not be too difficult. You can use additional features like making it possible for the users of your application to personalize it for their specific and individual needs. This has been proven to turn many applications into highly sought-after mobile services.

It is well worth your time to take the extra trouble of ensuring that your mobile application is highly desirable to customers because the reality is that there are plenty of others competing for the attention of your prospects out there.

One of the things you can do is to ensure that you have a rich, loaded interface. Pay attention to the little but important details like taking full advantage of the phone functions like touch screen features which are usually a big hit with phone users.

If it is something that your users will enjoy and want to keep using then you have a hit and an amazing communication channel to keep on talking to your prospects directly.

This way you can ensure that they remain loyal because they are continuously reminded of you in a way that they do not find annoying or intrusive. That is the real power of mobile applications in helping you create loyal customers.

Learn more about our mobile application development services.

© Global World Tech

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Later in September, analysts at Gartner then forecasted that Android would become the second largest platform worldwide by the end of the year, a slot currently held by Blackberry maker RIM. They also predicted that Android could reach the number one spot by 2014, ousting Nokia’s Symbian OS, which has held its high rank for years.

Schmidt spoke of other future search possibilities, too, during his time on stage, reiterating remarks he made earlier this month at Berlin’s IFA home electronics event. Specifically, he mentioned the idea that Google could one day function as a “serendipity engine,” an autonomous entity that could search things for you without you even typing a query.

“I’m interested in history, as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco I want my mobile device to tell me about the history here, think of it as a serendipity engine,” said Schmidt.

But for Google, the future of search is more than just mastering mobile, or becoming autonomous – it’s about an overall goal of “augmenting humanity.” Said Schmidt: “What we’re really doing is building an augmented version of humanity, building computers to help humans do the things they don’t do well better.”

He described a future where cars drive themselves, where you’re never lonely, bored or out of ideas. There will always be a friend you can connect to online or some form of entertainment or content on the Internet.

 Google CEO Eric Schmidt, speaking to the audience at the TechCrunch Disrupt  conference in San Francisco this week, said that his company expects mobile to  dominate search at some point in the future. “Eventually, we think mobile will be the  majority of the searches and the majority of the revenue,” he said. But that future could  take a long time to get here, he added. Schmidt also touched on the future of search in  general, at least as Google sees it, speaking of a time when Google searches become  automatic and autonomous, leading to “serendipitous” discovery of the world around  you.

Google is already seeing a trend towards increased mobile search, said Schmidt, citing the growing number of searches the company has seen coming from Android phones, the sharp rise in handset sales and the rapid adoption of the mobile Web worldwide.

Searches on Android phones – that is, those on devices made by companies like HTC, Motorola and Samsung that run Google’s mobile operating system called Android – have more than tripled in the first half of 2010, Schmidt said. He also noted that more than 200,000 Android devices are sold per day and that in two years, smartphone sales will outpace PC sales.

Another somewhat startling figure Schmidt cited was the growth of the mobile Web in general. Mobile Web adoption is occurring eight times faster than it did on the PC, he said.

These figures shouldn’t be surprising to those following mobile industry trends. After all, only last month reports stated that Android shipments worldwide had increased by nearly 900% in Q2 2010. In the U.S., the largest smartphone market in the world, Android devices represented a 34% market share during that quarter and also became the largest smartphone platform in the country.

This future isn’t just going to be available to the techno-elites, either, said Schmidt, but to the billions of people around the world. “Because of technology, because of Internet access,” he said, “this is a market for one billion now, two billion soon, and in our lifetime five-to-six billion altogether.”

Written by: Sarah Perez

Although the number of people who own cell phones is similar to last year’s, people use much more of the phones’ capabilities than in 2009. Of all cell phone owners in the study:

• 54 percent have used their phone to send a photo or video.
• 23 percent have accessed a social networking site by phone.
• 20 percent have watched video using the phone.
• 15 percent have used the phone to post a photo or video online.
• 11 percent have purchased products using their phone.
• 11 percent have used texting to make a charitable donation.
• 10 percent have used their phone to access a status update service such as Twitter.

Not surprisingly, young adults (18-29) are most likely to use more of their phones’ capabilities (95 percent use mobile phones to text, 93 percent use them to take photos, and 20 percent use them to make purchases). But use of mobile capabilities is growing rapidly in the 30-to-49 age demographic. Among this group:

• 83 percent use their phone to take pictures (up 12 points from 2009).
• 39 percent use the phone to make videos (up 18 points).
• 36 percent use the phone to play music (up 15 points).
• 43 percent use the phone to go online (up 12 points).

More and more, cell phones are becoming essential tools for doing just about everything. And while it’s no surprise that younger consumers rely heavily on their phones, older consumers are quickly catching up. Whether by developing an iPhone app for your business, texting deals to customers, or optimizing your website for mobile access, think about how your business can be part of customers’ lives wherever they go.

In earlier posts we mention that the mobile space has a range of device types and content often renders better when tailored to specific device characteristics or features. Adaptation is about exploiting those features where they exist, while avoiding them in others. Another part of adaptation requires working around problems found in specific devices. Adaptation can occur at the server or at the client side (the device). It’s also possible for adaptation to take place in the network, and operators frequently do some adaptation between your Web site and the device.

Client Side Adaptation

Client side adaptation usually relies on using the media selectors associated with CSS. Stylesheets can provide a different experience for the same page on mobile by using the ‘handheld’ media type. While this can be a useful form of adaptation, it is limited. The mobile downloads the same XHTML markup as a desktop browser, which might unnecessarily taking time and cost the user money with content that’s ends up not being displayed. To include different mobile and desktop stylesheets in your document, add link elements like the following:

link href=”screen.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”screen”
link href=”mobile.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” media=”handheld”

Alternatively, screen and handheld styles can appear in the same style sheet, using the @media CSS rule. For example, if you wanted to suppress the display of an image in the mobile presentation, identify the image element using the id attribute (calling it ‘image1’), and then refer to it within the style sheet:

@media handheld
{
#image1
{display: none}
}

Note that most browsers will still download the image, and users will suffer the delay and cost of doing this. So client side adaptation with CSS is mainly useful when varying the presentation style, or order of the content.

Scripting is another technique for client side adaptation. In the desktop world scripting is often used to accommodate differences between browsers. However, on mobile more care has to be taken, because low-end devices often include no or limited support for scripts. But for high end devices—where you know the device capabilities—this can be a handy technique.

Server Side Adaptation

Server side adaptation comes in various forms. At its simplest, it relates to using scripting to vary small parts of the page delivery. One example is changing the HTTP Content-Type header attached to the content but, it’s not typical to use the content type text/html when delivering to mobile devices. On the other hand, when delivering such pages to some versions of Internet Explorer on the desktop, it can be more effective to use that content type. In this example, the adaptation would consist of a test to see which User Agent (browser) accesses the page and deliver the chosen header based on whether the browser is Internet Explorer or not.

The following is a simple (and incomplete) example of how to do this in the server side scripting language PHP:

$msie = strpos($_SERVER[“HTTP_USER_AGENT”],’MSIE’) > 0;
if (!$msie)
{
header(“Content-Type: application/xhtml+xml; charset=UTF-8”);}
else {
header(“Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8”);
}

Other examples of varying the content to better suit device characteristics include presenting an appropriately sized image for the device accessing the page. A good general guidance for low-end devices is to limit images to 120px width. Those with high-end devices will have a much better experience if the image fits their screen and its color depth. Because it wastes bandwidth to transfer images that are bigger than the screen can handle, it’s good practice to resize images at the server prior to transmission. Do this by preparing specifically sized images in advance and choosing the biggest size that will fit; or dynamically resize the image at the point of delivery.

Both approaches have advantages: The former is better when the image must preserve specific details. The advantage of dynamic resizing is its ability to fit an image exactly to the device.

While designing for mobile may sound limiting compared to the sophistication of designing for desktop-oriented Web sites, there is nonetheless great scope for creating useful and appealing designs for mobile.

You can create rich mobile experiences but care needs to be taken to match the design to the capabilities of the requesting device: a site is only as good as the browser that displays it. Devices and browsers are already very good, and improving rapidly, but you can still expect to encounter hurdles like slow load times, reduced device compatibility and inconsistent stylesheet support.

Designing for the Right Device

1. Feature Phones: These are the most common device type. Feature phones usually come in candy bar, clamshell or slider form. They have a 12-key layout and typically come with voice, messaging and data capabilities. Most feature phones sold in the past three years also come with built-in digital cameras and media players. Companies typically target these phones to the general consumer.

2. Smart Phones: Smart phones share the same features as a feature phone with two primary differences: Its ability to run additional third-party applications and a slightly larger screen. Smart phones typically use a more full featured operating system and companies market them as them as advanced multimedia devices to consumers or as productivity devices to the business sector.

3. PDAs: These devices — evolved from the PDAs of the ‘90s — now often include voice, messaging, and data capabilities. PDAs have much in common with the smart phone but differ in that much of their functionality is primarily oriented towards organizational tasks rather then voice communications. Another difference is that PDAs often include QWERTY keyboard and stylus in place of the 12-key layout on normal phones. They also feature a larger screen that can often switch between portrait and landscape mode.

Feature Phones lead the market by a large margin but bear in mind that the borderline between the Feature Phones and Smart Phones is constantly shifting towards the Smart Phone category – the newest Feature Phones are often equal in functionality to yesterday’s Smart Phones.

Mobile Web Navigation

We are accustomed to a variety of navigation schemes on the Web such as tabbed navigation schemes and menus located on the sides of the main page content. These schemes give us useful visual clues about where we’re located within the site and provide reference points on how to navigate within the site. Obviously, this is more difficult to do in a mobile context because of the mobile devices’ limited screen size and navigation capability constraints. While it isn’t impossible to use desktop style navigation scheme like tabs on a mobile device, they generally do not work as well as they do on the desktop due to the limited device screen size and pointing capabilities.

The preferred and most common method of creating mobile navigation schemes is to use a simple vertical list of options, often assigning and listing the corresponding numbers (0–9) to the accesskeys for keypad navigation. You can design this list in many ways using stylesheets or images. You should consider supporting more advanced navigation methods for higher-end phones to ensure a rich user experience on these devices.

Not only does the desktop Web rely on navigation schemes we have taken for granted, but we also tend to design for it in landscape mode, where the pages are wider than they are tall. Designing for the mobile requires switching the thinking to portrait mode where the content is typically taller than it is wide.

Even at 3G speeds data retrieval on a mobile phone takes significantly longer than we are accustomed to on a desktop PC. It doesn’t take long for users to become frustrated with lengthy sequences of retrievals, and give up. So getting this right is extremely important. In the mobile context it is especially important to structure information as simply as possible. Placing the right information in the right place is an important part of providing a usable experience; getting it wrong means providing a poor experience.

On the other hand, a user presented with a clear goal and intelligent ways to reach it, may tolerate latency issues and the time taken to reach the goal. This is best done by setting user expectations. Every link should use clear labels to communicate to the user what to expect on the resulting page, thereby lowering the risk of click disappointment.

Keep It Simple

The best advice for creating a strong mobile information architecture is to keep it as simple as possible. The following two approaches work well when structuring your IA for mobile presentation:

• Limit choices. Take the content that’s relevant to a mobile user and discard the rest. This results in a simple and focused IA that cuts down the risk of the user getting lost. This approach works well with small, focused sites.
• Create a simple site drill-down architecture, nesting content into well-labeled categories. While this sounds straightforward, it’s necessary to plan carefully before taking this approach. A typical Web site has sub-pages – users follow a link to reach the sub-page. This is drilling down to find the information the user seeks on the Web site.

Drill-Down Recommendations

Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind when considering a drill-down approach for your site:

• Limit categories as much possible: Users become increasingly disoriented as they go deeper into a site. With a Mobile Web site, their tolerance often stops at about five levels – the fewer levels the better You should adjust this number upwards when targeting more capable devices.
• Attempt to limit links to ten per page unless you know that the device can present more information well: You should code your links with accesskeys, so that the user can use the phone keypad to navigate links. We recommend a assigning up to ten accesskeys to any page (0–9) to ensure compatibility with older devices. You should adjust this number upwards when targeting more capable devices that can display this information better.
• Provide at least one content item with each category page i.e. avoid empty links: Giving users at least one sample of the content within a category is a good way to make sure that users get to the right place. Consider placing a link to the featured content with a one or two sentence overview. The shorter, the better.
• Prioritize links by activity or popularity: This is often referred to as “deck placement.” Sorting links in order by frequency of access ensures that the most sought-after content appears first on the list. You improve a user’s chances of getting to the right destination.

The Web has revolutionized how we interact with and publish information, but up to now it has only been accessible to people with desktop devices. Web-enabled mobile phones now extend the expected global reach of the Web to three times that of today, touching one-third of the population of the planet.

Some of the more important benefits of the Mobile Web are:

• It can enable access to information, any time and anywhere there is cell phone coverage. By freeing information from the restrictions of a desk or search for a nearby WiFi hotspot, people can quickly retrieve and exchange information.
• It provides vast connectivity. One-third of the population currently has access to the Internet through a mobile device. This number is twice as many as the number of Internet-connected personal computers (PCs).
• It enables services to take advantage of mobile device capabilities such as clicking on a phone number to call it or add it to the device address book.
• It can provide location-based content. Location technologies can enable location-based information be provided to a user. This can reduce the steps required for the user to reach useful content, and so makes it accessible with the least amount of effort.

In a fast-growing mobile society, businesses, organizations and individuals need to reach and interact with their customers while mobile. For content providers, it opens a new and more profitable revenue stream, without having to rely on mobile service provider portals.

When should I start?

You should start a mobile project by defining the overall goals for the site. Consider grouping these into the following three categories for easier management and using their related questions to define goals:

• Business: These come from your project’s business goals and should be clearly defined before you begin. What are your organization’s goals? How does a mobile presence help your organization achieve its goals? Does it improve my current business reach? Does it provide new business opportunities? Is there an opportunity for innovation? Depending on your business case, you could choose anything between providing a great experience on all mobile devices, or creating a basic web site with free tools in a short time.
• User: User goals (and sometimes constraints) reflect your audience’s goals. How does your audience benefit from a mobile presentation? What tasks will they accomplish with your mobile content? Does the immediacy of mobile help the user? How will they interact with your content? Context is big in mobile, so the key is to understand your users’ wants and needs. Ensure that you value the attention, time and money of your audience, i.e. value your customer.
• Technical: Technology and resource opportunities and constraints. Look at these goals as a triangle or three-legged stool. When making decisions, try to find and maintain a balance on all three sides: business, user and technical. If you lean on one side too much or too little, then the other sides suffer.

User goals usually make a great place to start, and this is especially true when considering mobile.