olo:

OLO, a web and mobile online ordering service for restaurants, is celebrating a lot of things: bigger office space in New York’s South St. Seaport district, hitting the 1 million customer milestone, adding new restaurant partners, and plans to launch its long-awaited GrubHub integration, nearly a year in the making.

For those unfamiliar, OLO is a B2B(toC!) service that allows customers to order ahead and pay online or on mobile (where available) for takeout and delivery at local restaurants. Customers input their order which is then sent directly to the business’s POS system, with OLO snagging a percentage of the transaction fee along the way.

OLO currently powers the online ordering systems for several big-name chains, including Subway (its NYC locations), Five Guys Burgers & Fries, Cold Stone Creamery and SONIC, for example.

It has also just signed an ice cream chain (hint: makers of the delicious ice cream cakes), a U.S. barbecue chain, San Francisco bakery La Boulange, Fatburger, and the South African-based Nando’s, which operates stores in the Washington D.C. area. This year, OLO will begin to power the overseas Nando’s locations, including those in the U.K. and Australia, too. The company also plans to expand into Latin America and Canada in 2012.

In March of last year, OLO announced a partnership with online ordering provider GrubHub, which, until then, had been focused only on independent restaurants, not chains. The partnership makes OLO the exclusive provider of restaurant chain ordering to GrubHub. Going forward, OLO will provide both restaurant and menuing information to GrubHub for its partner restaurants, allowing GrubHub customers to place orders and make payments via GrubHub for the OLO-powered chains.

Those integrations are now just a couple of weeks away from launching, starting with OLO-powered restaurants in the NY and Chicago areas. By the end of March, all of OLO’s restaurants will be live on GrubHub.

In addition to powering the ordering systems of major chains, OLO also runs GoMobo, a B2C service that lets customers order online or via text. But the company shifted its focus from B2C in December 2010, when it acquired the OLO.com domain name. “The name change was symbolic of the shift from being a B2C company…to being the backend technology for big brands,” says CEO Noah Glass.

For restaurants, signing up for OLO brings hundreds of new customers. “For every new door that we open, a restaurant will get 250 new customers joining the service,” Glass says. When brands launch on mobile (OLO provides white label apps, too),  they see even more signups – around 400 to 500 new customers, Glass estimates.

Although OLO is doing well now, it’s early days for the up-and-coming company which saw 10x growth over the past 16 months, and now counts over 150 restaurant brands and thousands of individual restaurant stores as partners. “There are 600,000 restaurants in the U.S. that we think would work well for the service – it feels like there are many more brands for us to sign,” Glass says of the company’s plans for growth.

“More and more customers are looking for self-service experiences – not just in food, but in banks, airlines, and online shopping – we’re taking one of the lowest tech industries and bringing that self-service capability to the restaurant experience.”

OLO received $7 million in additional funding from RRE, Founder Collective, and Core Capital in 2008, bringing its total funding to date to $8.75 million. Glass says they’re not looking to raise additional capital now.

olo:

OLO is honored to have such a positive review of the Five Guys iPhone app, built on the OLO API, from such an expert as Dan Frakes! Congratulations to Five Guys, Solertium, and OLO. OLO is eager to help more restaurant brands launch and operate five-star apps.

• Download the iPhone/iPad app here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/five-guys-burgers-fries/id457494327?mt=8
• Download the Android app here: https://market.android.com/details?id=com.fiveguys.olo.android&feature=search_result

(Blackberry coming soon!)

“The Five Guys Burgers & Fries app for ordering from the ever-expanding burger chain is good in all the ways the Baja Fresh app is bad. Launch the app and give it permission to use your location, and you’re immediately presented with a list of nearby restaurants, closest first. (As with the Baja Fresh app, you’ll need to create an account the first time you use the Five Guys app.) If you want to find a restaurant in a different location, just type in the zip code and tap the search button.

Tap a restaurant, and you see a page displaying the restaurant’s address, hours, and distance from your current location, as well as a Google Maps map of the store’s location. (The app is optimized for both the iPhone and the iPad, so it takes good advantage of the tablet’s larger screen here.) Tap Directions To This Store to switch to the Maps app and get directions—with the starting and ending locations automatically filled for you—or tap Order From This Store to start the order process. Unlike with the Baja Fresh app, if you do decide to switch to the Maps app, or to quit the Five Guys app for any other reason, you’ll be right where you left off when you come back.

High Five: The Five Guys menu (left) is easy to navigate, and the app makes it fun to customize your order (right).

Before you choose your items, the app asks if you want to pick up your order now or later. (Now places your order for immediate pickup; later lets you choose a date and time.) You’re then taken to the Menu page, which groups all menu items into five simple categories: Burgers, Dogs, Sandwiches, Fries, and Drinks. Tap a category to see a simple list of items in that category, along with the price of each. Granted, Five Guys offers far fewer menu items than Baja Fresh, and most of those items don’t require a lengthy description, but the Five Guys menu is much easier to navigate, and the app itself is much faster to load screens and perform actions.

Like the Baja Fresh app, the Five Guys app lets you customize most menu items. Choose a burger, hot dog, or other sandwich, and the next screen lists the myriad toppings and condiments you can opt for. Tap an extra, such as Grilled Onions, to add it, or double-tap for more options: Regular, Lite, or Extra. The menus screens for drinks and fries let you easily order any combination of drinks or french-fry styles and sizes using helpful more (+) and fewer (-) buttons. When you’re done configuring any sandwich, your drinks, or your fries, tap Add To My Bag, which takes you back to the main menu-category page.

The bottom of that menu page always provides a Review My Bag button that also displays the current total for your order and, when tapped, takes you to the ordering page. If you haven’t added any fries, the app prompts you to do so. (If this prompt annoys you, just tap Never Ask Again.) After reviewing your order, tap Place Your Order, and the app uses the credit card you provided with your account to make the purchase. The process is simple and straightforward—I never had to wonder if I was doing the right thing or how to go back to the previous screen or the main Menu page.

As someone whose take-out orders are regularly screwed up, just as pleasing is what happens after you place your order: You get an easy-to-read summary—both within the app and via email—that lists your entire order in precise detail, along with the pickup time, the restaurant and feedback phone numbers, and a link to an online feedback form. Indeed, when we showed up at the restaurant at the specified time, we walked up to the pickup counter, grabbed our ready-and-waiting bag, and left; everything was exactly as we ordered it. (Another nice touch: On the outside of the bag is a receipt with each sandwich numbered; those numbers correspond to numbers on the wrapper for each sandwich, making it easy to figure out whose is whose.)

The Five Guys app also offers a few nice extras. When reviewing your order, you can tap the plus (+) button next to any item to add another just like it. And after placing your order, the app asks if you’d like to create a favorite—which includes both the chosen restaurant and the items in your bag—for that order, making it easy to repeat that order in the future. (To do so, you just tap Favorites on the opening screen of the app, and then tap a favorite order; you’re asked the now-or-later question, and then your bag is filled and ready for checkout. You can even modify the items if you like.) My only beef here is that I wish you could create favorite items—say, your favorite cheeseburger configuration—that you could add to any order.

Sadly, from what I’ve seen, most take-out apps are closer in quality and experience to the Baja Fresh app than to the Five Guys app. So let me make a humble suggestion to restauranteurs: If you’re considering making an iOS app for ordering on the go, download the Five Guys app and try it out. And then copy it as closely as possible. Take-out eaters everywhere will thank you.” - Dan Frakes, Sr. Editor of Macworld.com

olo:

What if the customer could Skip the Line®?

What if he never had to wait in a long queue, speak his order to a cashier, hand over his credit card, or stand around waiting for his food to be cooked?

Six years ago, this simple vision for better, faster service at busy restaurants inspired OLO.

Today, I am delighted to share the news that

olo:

Join OLO this Saturday for “Skip the Line: The Five Guys Case Study for Ordering Ahead” http://www.paperlesspost.com/p/5e50a24d66

The other week, I sat next to a restaurant operator on the third day of a marquis restaurant conference.

• “What are you hearing so far?” I asked him.

• “If I hear the term ‘social media’ one more time, I think my head will explode,” he shot back.

So, what’s with all of the talk about social media? Think about it this way: every restaurant executive knows how important it is to “go where the customers are” when launching new stores. The same concept holds true on the Internet. A recent study by BIA/Kelsey found that 97% of customers use the Internet when researching local buying decisions. This means that virtually everyone is going online to find the next great restaurant.

Websites like Google, Facebook, and Citysearch are more than just social media websites; they are the very data sources where customers are researching nearby restaurants online. And there are more than 250 other websites (and now mobile apps) where your restaurant needs to be in order to win new customers. In the new world in which the Internet is the #1 decision tool for deciding where to eat, this is crucial to business.

So, how can you manage this complex world without your head exploding? Fear not. Wherever there is complexity, wherever there is a broken system in need of a better way, look for entrepreneurs; we will be there. There are several start ups in New York City that are working hard to make it easy to manage your online presence beyond your website. Take, for example, Single Platform* ( www.singleplatform.com): a dead-simple, yet revolutionary approach to “manage your digital presence and gain new customers.” Single Platform helps single unit operators and big chains manage all of the complexity of the Internet on, you guessed it, a single platform.

What if you could go one step further and make every social media website into a point-of-sale for your restaurant? What if you could tap the Internet to generate new customers and increase same store sales? What if you could do so without increasing your overhead or your marketing budget? You can.

One of the greatest benefits of online ordering is that it transposes your point-of-sale from behind the counter onto the computer screen, and into the hands of your customers. With online ordering, your customers can select their closest store, custom build their order, prepay with a credit card or gift card, and schedule their own pickup time. And, they can go at their own pace, without waiting on hold or struggling to communicate order details to a busy employee. Combine the ease, speed, and accuracy of online ordering with the ubiquity of social media and you have a true winning combination.

This article originally appeared on Digital Brand Camp (http://dbrandcamp.squarespace.com/).

olo:

OLO is honored to team up with GrubHub and give restaurant chains an easy way to join the #1 online ordering platform in the United States. Call OLO toll-free at 1 877 466 6260, email sales|at|olo.com, or simply get started at www.olo.com. And while you are at it, watch the new OLO video at www.olo.com/video