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OpenTable, the world’s largest online reservation service, lets users book a restaurant reservation with its smartphone app or Web site. Now the company is getting ready to take the next step and let diners pay for the meal with its app, too.
The payment process, still in testing, will be straightforward, Matthew Roberts, chief executive of OpenTable, said in an interview. At the end of a meal, the diner would open the OpenTable app and pay the check with the tap of a button. The diner can review the check, adjust the tip and finish the payment.
“There’s no scanning, there’s no bar codes, there’s no geeky stuff,†Mr. Roberts said. He said that OpenTable would not take a cut of each transaction if a diner paid with the app. The restaurant would be charged the typical interchange fee for a credit card transaction. The simple transactions through the app are another way to attract people to use OpenTable, which charges restaurants for reservations made through the service as well as a monthly service charge for using its equipment.
OpenTable, which works with 28,000 restaurants around the world, in June paid $11 million in stock to acquire JustChalo, a mobile technology company working on a payments application for restaurants. JustChalo is still running a pilot program testing the payments system in 20 restaurants. By the end of the year, OpenTable will introduce its mobile payments system for San Francisco, where it is based, and expand from there, Mr. Roberts said.
OpenTable is being cautious with its release of mobile payments, because integrating technology into dining can be difficult. Paying with an app could decrease the amount of time a diner has to wait for a waiter to bring the check. But a waiter could easily think diners were skipping the check if they pay the tab with a phone, get up and leave. OpenTable is trying to solve problems like this before the feature goes live, Mr. Roberts said. One potential solution to avoid confusion is for the system to send a notification to the restaurant workers, letting them know the diner has paid.
“The last thing you want is a server to chase somebody out of the building,†he said.
As my colleague Charlie Savage reports, a military judge found Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks, not guilty of aiding the enemy but guilty of multiple counts of violating espionage act at the conclusion of his court-martial in Fort Meade, Md. on Tuesday.
The Lede will be rounding up reaction to the verdict as it comes in.
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A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search â€" new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it.
Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was, Claire Cain Miller reports.
How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out that you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.
The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first that is tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require a person to enter a search query. Your context â€" location, time of day and digital activity â€" is the query, say the engineers who build these services.
Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, an app called Google Now is an important part of Google’s Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.
Google Now is “kind of blowing my mind right now,†said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. “I mean, I’m pretty jaded, right? I’ve seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven’t. Google Now is doing that.â€