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Patrick Malone posted an article:iTendr for iPhones Challenges Open Table for Executive Dining Reservations
see moreiTendr for iPhones Challenges Open Table for Executive Dining Reservations
VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA -- (Marketwire) -- 01/28/13 -- iTendr targets executive assistants and hotel concierges who struggle to book larger, last minute and VIP restaurant reservations for colleagues and guests.
With iTendr these prolific bookers enter their dining requirements into the app in seconds and quickly receive multiple responses from familiar restaurants confirming their availability and asserting their suitability, eliminating the time that is wasted playing telephone tag for these busy professionals.
iTendr works for reservations of all size, can be tailored towards locally-owned restaurants, is free for bookers and completely private. Booking arrangements are swiftly finalized in normal fashion after the restaurant has been selected.
The restaurant reservation market is unsegregated, forcing institutional clients to battle with a far larger mass of cost-conscious retail clients for a finite amount of space. iTendr consolidates this lucrative business onto one site and charges accredited restaurants access to these VIP clients well down the path to purchase.
Using mobile tech to match the marketing muscle of the majors, iTendr gets smaller restaurants into the ring to fight for their share of this lucrative business.
Government dining for example, that is far too often single sourced into generic, foreign-owned hotels on account of the ease with which they can be booked can now efficiently redirect these public funds towards charming, locally-owned restaurants.
Founder and CEO Patrick Malone is fond of reminding government officials who it is who owns the popular Four Seasons Hotel, "Bill Gates, and I think he's rich enough already, so use iTendr and start spending tax dollars locally."
Response from both bookers and restaurants has been tremendous; iTendr launches in Vancouver and Toronto in the coming weeks.
Canadian restaurants will lead the world with the first covert two tier reservation system where retail clients can be welcomed first come first served while corporate clients who require a confirmed reservation can be prospected from a single source and provided the iTendr Advantage.
iTendr has a suite of services to better serve restauranteurs at a fraction of the cost of Open Table. Please see recently released iPad app Floorboard as an example of the nimble infographic tech the iTendr team is pioneering. Contacts: iTendr Patrick Malone Founder & CEO 604.317.5477 patrick@itendr.com www.itendr.com
Via: http://www.bloomberg.com/article/2013-01-28/aktHrBCAt9eU.html
3 months agoBy Patrick Malone -
Carly Graham posted an article:Posted by see more Posted by Knowlton Thomas on 2012-06-27 9:40:00 AM
Each year, 1.5 million students travel to learn English in Anglophone countries. As a result, the ESL market is worth more than $4 billion annually.
A Vancouver-based startup called ESL Explorer has just opened for business and hopes to become a part of this multi-billion-dollar market by offering a healthy dose of the Internet into an industry that operates like the travel agency industry did 15 years ago.
The Canadian startup brings together students who are seeking to learn English and schools who teach English in a transparent online environment, combining social elements (like Facebook), ratings and reviews (like TripAdvisor), and recommendations and e-commerce functionality (like Amazon), to provide a unique community marketplace for the language travel industry.
ESL Explorer provides a niche social network for those 1.5 million students to connect with others who share their interest in language and travel. And it even helps find the perfect experience for each student, by providing a system that matches students’ preferences to schools’ areas of strength. Further, students are able to complete the purchase of their entire language travel experience through ESL Explorer.
"We're building technology that will do good in the world," says founder Nick Miller. "When students choose schools based on transparent reviews, the schools will focus on quality of education. With great language education, people communicate and understand each other more thoroughly. And when we understand one another, it's easier to build a better world."
SOURCE: http://www.techvibes.com/blog/vancouvers-esl-explorer-officially-launches-aims-to-revolutionize-language-travel-industry-2012-06-27 June 27, 2012
11 months agoBy Carly Graham -
Carly Graham posted an article:see more
Five months ago Renat Gataullin was in a park on the California coast.
Five months ago Renat Gataullin was in a park on the California coast.
He was with the two co-founders of his company, some friends and their nephews. They were flying kites when an idea came to them. The three men had been searching for a name for a new phone app they’d created for children.
It was right in front of them.
“Kites have the freedom to fly around but you do have a string to pull it,” Gataullin says. It was an apt metaphor. Their app allows parents to control the phone but still lets children play games and make calls to trusted numbers.
“Kids have the freedom to use it but parents still have peace of mind,” he says.
It’s called Kytephone and it officially launched on Tuesday June 12. The app transforms any Android phone into a kid friendly zone. Parents control the numbers their child can communicate with and set limits to the types of apps they download through a browser program.
Kytephone completely transforms Android phones, giving them a kid friendly look and feel. Photo: Kytephone
It also lets parents track their children using GPS. “One of the immediate questions parents have is, ‘Where are my children?’” Gataullin says. “If we have the GPS feature we can immediately answer this question. Parents can log into the dashboard and view the kid’s location in real time.”
What parents see from their browser when they check the location of the phone. Photo: Kytephone.
Parents can also limit the use of games through Kytephone. They can set gaming time limits, such as one hour per day, or rules, like no games after 10 pm. They can also control the types of games their child downloads.
“The idea was to enable only certain applications and hide the rest,” Gataullin says. “Parents can enable some educational games and disable other games if kids aren’t behaving well.”
Kytephone’s interface uses photos or character images instead of numbers. Photo: Kytephone
Kytephone is based in Toronto but much of the product development took place in Silicon Valley. This winter the team took part in an accelerator program (a type of bootcamp for young tech companies) called Y Combinator in Mountain View, California.
Y Combinator helped fund Kytephone and also gave the team access to some of the brightest minds in tech. During their three month stint with Y Combinator the Kytephone team met the founders of both Twitter and PayPal.
It was in Mountain View that the team made a drastic switch from Gataullin’s original idea, which was to create a simplified phone interface for older users, like his mother, who aren’t comfortable with technology.
Realizing the number of people who aren’t comfortable using smartphones is a shrinking demographic rather than a growing one, they went in another direction. “We decided to look at the other end of the spectrum, which is kids,” Gataullin says.
There have been attempts to make phones for children before. Firefly Mobile makes phones designed for kids but it focuses on creating hardware. Kytephone takes a different approach, modifying software to suit kids instead of creating a physical phone.
Kytephone is available for free in the Google Play store.
View Original Article Here11 months agoBy Carly Graham
