Table37

I’m pleased to announce that our biggest project to date is now available on the App Store and Google Play.

Table37 is a full-featured restaurant management system. When Table37 came to us with the idea of modernizing everything about how a restaurant manages its contact with customers, we thought it was a terrific use of technology.

The core of the service is an iPad app that is used by the hostess at a typical restaurant. She is responsible for greeting new diners, adding them to a wait list or checking them off in a reservation book and eventually seating them. Often, she’s managing at least one piece of paper (the wait list), a book (for reservations), a grease board (to track what tables are occupied) and a stack of RF pagers (to notify waiting diners that a table is ready).

With Table37, all of this is replaced by a single iPad that manages the wait list, a calendar of reservations and the seating chart. Paging diners is done with a simple SMS message to any cell phone or, if the diner has installed the Table37 smartphone app, a push notification.

The Table37 smartphone apps for iPhone and Android allow diners to browse restaurants much like OpenTable, make future reservations and even add themselves to the wait list.

The backend is a custom Ruby on Rails app and manages the restaurant. It also provides widgets for a restaurant’s own website and Facebook so that diners can make reservations online from any web browser. Reservation and wait list changes are sent down to the running iPad app instantly, where the hostess can immediately see that something changed without interrupting her current task.

This project was challenging and we had a lot of fun devising solutions to solve the technical and usability issues. I’m looking forward to seeing the system in use in restaurants first hand!