David Chen thinks it’s high time that restaurants enter the online age.
Hungry consumers are clamoring to click on a website that provides access to the menu, prices, online reservations and delivery orders for their favorite restaurants.
Get ready for the world of food 2.0 A Carnegie Mellon
Project Olympus startup,
Fooala, pronounced foo-ala, is preparing to launch a website this summer that hopes to entice restaurants to join the technology party. About 25 restaurants in Youngstown, Ohio, are already on board with a pilot program to test the program.
“We think it’s a pretty lucrative business opportunity because more and people are looking online to find this information,” says Chen, a Carnegie Mellon junior. “It’s a pretty huge market.”
In addition to helping restaurants with an easy-to-access program for expanding operations and e-commerce business, Fooala is working with car manufacturers to develop an application that allows consumers to see wait times for tables and place reservations on the fly. The website will be a one-stop shop that will interface with other foodie websites as well.
The company operates from the Project Olympus Oakland office and employs three to five full and part-time people. Additional funding is being sought. Fooala will make money through a small transaction fee on each order paid by restaurants. The service is free for the customer, Chen says.
Chen, who has already sold one business idea to a Silicon Valley investor, developed the idea while studying in Australia. He hopes to take the business nationwide, maybe even worldwide.
“We were looking online for places to eat and found that good websites just didn’t exist,” Chen says. “Even in the U.S. the information is not comprehensive and services are not always available. We have a good feeling about this.”
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Writer:
Debra Diamond SmitSource: David Chen, Fooala
Image courtesy Fooala