Hot on the heels of Reserveit.sg, a rival online restaurant reservation website in Singapore called Chope.com.sg has launched their own iPhone app.

It allows users to browse a list of restaurants, find out details like location, opening hours, and cuisine, and then reserve a table. The app was designed and developed by Burpple, a mobile social food journal that launched a few weeks ago.

It’s interesting that Burpple and Chope describe themselves as “mobile strategic partners”, and I believe we can expect more manifestations of the partnership to unveil in time to come.

For example, if Burpple can incorporate a Chope-powered restaurant reservation feature into its mobile app, user experience could be dramatically improved.

Partnerships like these are what is needed in the startup scene. With limited resources and the need to be lean, startups can benefit by leveraging on each other’s capabilities and specializations.

Increasingly, we are starting to see not just partnerships between tech startups, but also between more traditional businesses like restaurants and mobile app developers.

Restaurants are starting to flock to mobile services like Perx, a loyalty card app, Swiff, a mobile payment service, online reservation apps like Chope and Reserveit.sg, as well as food delivery websites like FoodPanda and Dealivery.

This indicates that restaurant owners are willing to embrace online engagement beyond simply having Facebook Pages and Groupon deals.

With this supporting industry of food-related web and mobile apps emerging, restaurants (especially young ones that face small profit margins and high rentals) can certainly benefit from the reduced friction of getting food onto the diner’s tables.

A customer named Gary Tan posted a complaint on the company’s Facebook Page alleging that he has been discriminated against.

Apparently, his request to get a corner table for three for himself and a guest was rejected. However, a foreigner that came in later was able to do the same. Think Rosa Parks, 21st Century version.

What really pissed people off, however, was the response from Guy Wachs, the restaurant’s founder. He said: “Dear sir, we have an international staff including many Singaporeans and respect all people. We deeply regret your remark (emphasis mine). Guy Wachs, Director.”

A screenshot was captured of the comments, which was apparently deleted. It caught fire on the forums (examples here and here) since yesterday:

Some of you may be shocked by the venom thrown at foreigners in these forums. It’s a political issue, which I’m not going to dwell on, but here’s the gist of it: Many Singaporeans have been rather peeved lately by the government’s liberal immigration policies, and they feel like they’re not being taken cared of enough.

In this context, the tepid reaction towards the restaurant’s actions wasn’t surprising.

Regardless of who’s right or wrong here, there are many lessons startups can learn from this incident. While I’m certainly no customer service expert, I intend this article to be the start of a fruitful discussion — a departure from the mindless raging you see in the forums.

1) When interacting with customers on social media, think twice before posting anything.

The Internet forgets easily, but it doesn’t forgive. Deleted articles and comments are easily captured and live on for perpetuity. While Internet users are generally fickle-minded and move quickly from controversy to controversy, rest assured that any online misdemeanor, real or perceived, can be easily dug out online.

With that in mind, it really pays to think carefully about how you respond to angry customers. As slighted as you feel — and that’s understandable since your business is your baby — a badly handled PR situation could boomerang on you, a hundred times.

In Guy Wach’s case, perhaps that terse comment wasn’t the best way to deal with the situation. Perhaps he did it in a moment of anger, and angry heads are not rational.

2) For God’s sake, read the news.

This controversy might have been avoided had the owners been more careful about the cultural context they operate in. As far removed as it sounds, understand not only the business environment, but also the society in its entirety. This can really help you get customers.

Had the Wild Honey folks been sensitive to the anti-foreigner sentiments brewing in Singapore right now, they might not have responded the way they did.

Whether or not this favoritism towards foreigners is really happening, the managers might want to ensure it will never occur, given how Singaporeans despise it.

3) If you decide to apologize to a customer, remember to validate your staff too, especially if they did nothing wrong.

As an entrepreneur, you aren’t just a PR spokesperson. You’re an employer, leader, and cheerleader. It’s often the case that the customer thinks they are right when in fact the employees did nothing wrong. In such instances, be sure to also pull your staff aside and reassure them that you have their backs. Public chastisement can backfire and bring down company morale.

4) Deleting negative comments on Facebook doesn’t help.

Tempting as it might sound to delete the negative comments that flood your Facebook Page as a result of the negative backlash, remember that a Facebook Page does not work the same way as your company newsletter. It is not a one-way street.

Deleting comments willy-nilly might give the impression that you’re hiding something or being insincere. A balance has to be struck here: While there are comments that deserve to be deleted for whatever reasons — being racist, for example — others should stand because they’re valuable feedback.

You have to roll with the punches.

5) Customers are not always right, so there’s no need to bend over backwards for them.

You are providing a service, not a sweatshop. Customers make all sorts of demands, and a lot of them are unreasonable. In the age of social media, people like to make a huge song and dance about a company when they feel offended, so giving them what they want — an insensitive comment — is the surest route towards a PR disaster.

To defuse a tense situation when you feel they are unjustified, make your response as uncontroversial as possible, while giving the impression that you are dealing with the situation behind closed doors. No need to give a public account. Do apologize, but do it without saying that the errant customer is right.

An alternative approach to consider is to give them exactly what they want, and more besides. It is the “turn the other cheek” method.

A good case study would be this incident that occurred between OCBC Bank and a customer who demanded a cake on her birthday.

She literally got her cake and ate it. And some backlash of her own on the side.

OCBC Bank came out the winner.

If only all vending machines are like that.

Following the successful trial of the ‘Coca-Cola Hug Machine’ in Singapore, which dispenses a free Coke every time someone gives it a warm hug, the well-known beverage company now plans to roll it out across Southeast Asia, reports Marketing Interactive.

The Hug Machine is part of Coca-Cola’s ‘Open Happiness’ global campaign that was started in 2009. The stated aim is to bring “positivity, optimism and fun to others.”

“The Coca-Cola Hug Machine is a simple idea to spread some happiness. Our strategy is to deliver doses of happiness in an unexpected, innovative way to engage not only the people present, but the audience at large,” Leonardo O’Grady, ASEAN IMC director of The Coca-Cola Company, told Marketing Interactive.

The company has generated a lot of buzz for its innovative usage of vending machines as marketing tools.

For example, a video depicting a magical Coca-Cola machine that dispenses anything from sandwiches to flowers garnered over four million views on YouTube.

Another creative idea involved a website that allows visitors to send a Coke to vending machines around the world, along with a recorded message. They can even see how people react after receiving the video recording.

It’ll be cool if these machines could magically rid the world of diabetes.

Just days after the mighty Rocket Internet launched their online food delivery service Food Panda in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s second largest daily deals site Deal.com.sg unveiled their very own competitor today —  DEALivery.sg.

Both websites now join HungryDelivery.com and EatIt.sg in an increasingly competitive food fight — a boon for consumers.

Rocket Internet is a German technology incubator that has been aggressively expanding to Southeast Asia in a variety of online verticals: Fashion store Zalora, Amazon-like website Lazada, and a Pinterest-clone called Pinspire.

While the well-funded Samwer Brothers have plenty of resources at their disposal, local player Deal.com.sg is no pushover either.

DEALivery.sg brings with it the advantage of having massive reach to a large customer base and over 1,000 F&B merchants in Singapore through its fledging daily deals cousin.

Execution-wise, both Food Panda and DEALivery.sg do it slightly differently.

Food Panda prompts you for your postal code, then shows a list of restaurants that deliver to your location. Every restaurant has a different delivery cost, ranging from zero to S$20 (US$16). DEALivery.sg, on the other hand, charges a flat fee of S$5 (US$4) for online delivery and S$7 (US$5.5) for phone delivery.

Another key difference is that while Food Panda has a minimum order amount, DEALivery.sg has none. This gives the latter a bigger potential market size in Singapore, increasing their revenue but possibly at the expense of profit margin.

Finally, DEALivery.sg has daily deals built into the site from the get-go, while Food Panda has none. Consumers can get daily deals that get delivered to their homes, cleverly leveraging their home court advantage.

But with Rocket Internet’s regional play, I wonder if it’ll be a matter of time before they catch up, features-wise.

Both shiny new sites, however, look much more impressive than the incumbants — HungryDelivery.com and EatIt.sg.

HungryDelivery.com only does phone delivery, and that might deter customers that demand greater convenience.

EatIt.sg, on the other hand, has a high minimum order amount, suffers from a lack of options, and requires food to be ordered three days in advance. Sure, it positions itself as an online catering company, but I wonder if that’s enough for it to survive.

It would appear that Singapore-based Reserveit.sg has maintained its front-runner status as the king of online restaurant reservation sites in Singapore.

Now, with the launch of their mobile app on iOS, they are leaving Chope.sg and TableDB in the dust.

Mobile is big in Singapore, so there’s definitely value in creating a mobile app to allow users to fluidly make reservations.

While there’s nothing groundbreaking about Reserveit.sg’s app, it does get the basics right: The app looks decent and works smoothly. All the features you’d expect are there.

Booking a table is easy. Pick a restaurant, select a time slot, and I’m all set. Removing a reservation is a breeze too. Just two taps required. Given how empty can hurt F&B establishments, the ability to easily cancel is very important.

One curious design decision comes in the reservation process. It uses your mobile number, requires you to key in a confirmation code sent via SMS, after which you have to select an email address and password.

I’d much rather use Facebook Connect.

The browsing experience is pretty good, but viewing the digital menus is painful to the eyes. To see the items, I need to pinch to zoom in. It’s something that can be easily avoided using mobile optimized menus.

Overall, I’d say this app is well-executed, and I don’t mind letting it sit on my iPhone. In fact, the app looks so good that the website now seems like an ugly duckling by comparison. I’m surprised they belong to the same company. Perhaps they can now devote some time to revamp the site…

Anyway,  compared to its competitors, Reserveit.sg, which launched in June 2011, has claimed to possess the biggest selection of restaurants.

It can now also proudly claim to be the most mobile-friendly.

Related articles:

Reserveit.sg: A one-stop online portal for restaurant reservations
Restaurant reservation sites take off in Singapore
Four up-and-coming trends in the restaurant business

Hot on the heels of the launch of Amazon-like website Lazada in Southeast Asia, Rocket Internet has today unveiled another one of its new ventures: An online food delivery service called Foodpanda, which is headquartered in Singapore but also available in Philippines, Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia.

While the Foodpanda website does not explicitly state that it is a Rocket Internet venture, the Germany-based company has long hinted that it would be launching a food delivery service through its job ads.  A furniture business is purportedly in the works as well.

Also, a check of Rocket Internet’s ACRA business profile reveals that it in fact shares the same Singapore office as Foodpanda.

So here’s how the service works: Users key in their postal code, and browse the list of restaurants that deliver to the stated address. They can then place their order and check out. Cash-on-delivery is the only payment option that’s accepted for now.

In Singapore, Foodpanda will compete for a share of the rice bowl with HungryDelivery.com, a dial-in food delivery service by HungryGoWhere.com, and EatIt.sg, which just launched in November 2011.

Some of the restaurants it is partnering with include: Sarpino’s Pizza, Ramen Ten, and The Shepard’s Pie.

In Thailand, it will have to face down rivals as well, with Chef XP and Food by Phone as the incumbents.

All gloves are off in the battle for mobile payment dominance in Asia.

In one corner is mighty PayPal, which will launch its own mobile credit card reader called PayPal Here in Singapore later this year. It is already available in Hong Kong, Australia, US, and Canada.

In the other corner is underdog Swiff, a Singapore-based startup that launched its own mobile payment service last week.

Both companies’ service include credit-card swiping devices that can be attached to a mobile phone or tablet to allow merchants to collect payments without the need for costly POS machines.

The idea originated from Square, a US-company founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey.

PayPal’s plans to expand its service to Singapore was made known shortly after Swiff held their launch last Thursday.

The company has touted PayPal Here as different from Swiff in one fundamental way.

While Swiff requires merchants to work with their bank and even third-party mobile POS providers to implement their system into business operations, PayPal Here needs only a smartphone, a free-of-charge card reader, and the free mobile app.

In other words, freelancers and individuals can start using PayPal Here to conduct transactions right away, while Swiff is only available to business establishments like restaurants and shops at the moment.

Swiff has promised, however, that peer-to-peer transactions are coming soon, so PayPal Here’s advantage might already be moot by the time it arrives in Singapore.

That’s not the only advantage PayPal has though. As it is an established brand name with a large presence globally, it has the benefit of trust and scale, something that Swiff will have to try very hard to build.

Also, Swiff’s decision to work through the merchant banks to sell their products could be a double-edged sword. While this approach has the potential to scale quicker than approaching merchants individually, and it mitigates the trust disadvantage, we don’t know how committed banks are to promoting Swiff.

According to Boon Teck Tan, business and operations manager at Kido Tech, a distributor of mobile POS systems, Swiff’s transaction rates, charged through its partner HSBC Bank, are in fact costlier than traditional POS systems for high volume merchants.

“I believe high volume merchants can get preferred rates that go down to between 1.2 and 1.5 percent, while Swiff’s rates are from 2.5 to 3.7 percent,” he says, “this difference could account for tens or even hundred of thousand dollars for the big merchants annually.”

In addition, HSBC charges a S$500 annual fee to certain merchants, according to Boon Teck.

However, Swiff has declined to publicly reveal its rates, so it’s unknown what kind of merchant the above rates apply to. But from what we know, it seems that big merchants are less likely to adopt Swiff’s services, which is just as well since Swiff is actually designed with smaller establishments in mind.

PayPal Here charges a transaction fee of 2.7 percent, but it does not have an annual fee.

Boon Teck contends that HSBC’s rates for Swiff could in fact be brought down further, but the risk-adverse nature of the banks does not allow for it.

“No one wants to be the first to push the envelop of the banking regulations,” he says.

As long as the banks have much invested large merchants and the traditional POS business, they are unlikely to rock the boat by disrupting the electronic payments industry.

With the open nature of the Internet, every tech startup faces the risk of being quickly rendered obsolete by well-moneyed technology giants.

For example, when Facebook Timeline launched, a small Chicago-based startup called Timelines.com sued, claiming that the social network could “quite possibly eliminate its entire business.”

Swiff, a Singapore-based startup that just launched its mobile credit card reader today worldwide, also faces competition from some of the world’s biggest tech companies. It’s not the first to do this either; Square, founded by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, launched in 2009.

The reader, attached to a mobile device, essentially allows merchants to collect payments without the need for expensive POS equipment, bringing cost savings and convenience. It is available on iOS, Android, and Blackberry.

The last time SGE featured Swiff was in October last year, and back then, there weren’t any players in this space in Asia.

But this month, PayPal launched PayPal Here, a similar service. It is already available in Hong Kong, Australia, Canada, and the US, and will hit other countries soon.

I spoke with Swiff COO Etienne Van den Bogaert, and he claimed that PayPal and Swiff are not exactly competitors.

While PayPal is taking market share away from banks by eliminating them out of the transaction equation entirely, Swiff works in partnership with banks instead to market its card reader to merchants. Transactions are made directly with the bank too.

In essence, it has a different go-to market strategy from PayPal or Square. So, instead of selling its card reader directly to restaurant owners and retailers, it is counting on the banks to reach out to users instead. Sounds good in theory, as it could save a lot of time and effort in the long run.

Currently, HSBC Bank has signed on as a partner, and talks with other merchant banks are still ongoing. The payment solution accepts credit cards from MasterCard, Visa, and American Express.

Their cooperation with banks can benefit merchants. By transacting directly with their bank, merchants can consolidate all the transaction details in one place, as opposed to PayPal, which actually holds money separate from the user’s bank account.

But that aside — I’m not convinced that both companies aren’t competing. Since every restaurant can only have one payment platform, it’s very likely that if they’re presented with either PayPal Here or Swiff, they’re going to have to choose.

Nevertheless, I think there’s going to be enough room for three or even four big players in Asia, and Swiff is in position to capture sizable market share.

Compared to traditional POS systems however, Swiff is potentially much cheaper to implement, and that is the most important thing. Retail and food startups face brutal profit margins, and they could benefit from a solution like this.

A traditional POS system can cost thousands of dollars to purchase, and that excludes maintenance fees that cost hundreds of dollars annually. It also takes a long time, sometimes a few minutes, to complete a transaction.

Swiff does away with all this. They only charge an activation fee of US$60, and a license fee of US$3. The bank will charge separate transaction fees that vary according to the country of operation and the nature of the business.

They did not want to reveal the exact percentage of the transaction fees though, so merchants that want to compare Swiff with PayPal or Square will have to inquire with the startup directly.

Right now, PayPal charges 2.70 percent per transaction. Square charges 2.75 percent per swipe, although it’s not available in Asia.

The company has also promised that Swiff can complete transactions more quickly than traditional POS systems, reducing waiting time and queues. It’s more flexible too. Instead of having to bring the customer’s credit card to the POS machine, transactions can now be make right next to the customer, who will also receive an electronic receipt via email.

To bring its solution to the masses, Swiff has established partnerships with several other companies.

Established businesses that want to implement Swiff into their existing POS systems can do so, while young enterprises that want to adopt mobile payment systems from the get-go can purchase Swiff-integrated iPad apps like Octopus, which has developed POS systems for both F&B and retail.

Octopus is developed by Eleos, a company that started off selling traditional POS systems but has pivoted for the digital age.

Besides the food and retail sector, Swiff is also targeting the telecommunications, logistics, and hospitality industries.

It will also launch a peer-to-peer transactions system which would allow payments to be made between two individuals. This could be useful for freelancers, tutors, and other self-employed workers.

They haven’t given a firm launch date though, but it will probably be some time this year.

Hainanese chicken rice

Singapore has always had a proud heritage of food entrepreneurs in decades past — accounting for the abundance of affordable hawker fare in the city streets.

Now, entrepreneur Ritchie Baldonado has brought the country’s hawker cuisine to a shopping mall in the Philippines, reported Business World Online.

He’s named the restaurant “Ang Mo Kio”, after a heartland housing estate in Singapore, which happens to have a lot of good food.

Opened in Ortigas Center in February, the restaurant has seen brisk business so far.

They cook about 20 to 30 whole chickens on weekdays for their Hainanese Chicken Rice dish, and 60 to 70 on weekends.

Laksa, a spicy noodle soup, and Chili Crab, are also popular items. The restaurant only serves 30 dishes of laksa a day, and they’re all sold before 6pm.

The restaurant kitchen is headed by Singaporean executive chef Justin Seah. A typical meal for two would cost around P1,000 (US$23).

Photo: avlxyz