Companies like Locu re beginning to bring all this data together for good, low-cost use.
FORBES: 3 Little Technologies You Never Heard Of...But May Have a BIG Impact On Your Business
Locu also provides an online tool for merchants, as a one-stop shop to manage and publish data.
Beyond macro questions, Locu also wants to answer questions on a micro level for individual merchants, Marcus says.
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With Locu, you use your online dashboard to make changes simply and quickly.
FORBES: 3 Little Technologies You Never Heard Of...But May Have a BIG Impact On Your Business
Quietly, a little company called Locu has built up a database of over half a million businesses in the restaurant industry.
FORBES: 3 Little Technologies You Never Heard Of...But May Have a BIG Impact On Your Business
Locu also analyzed beer availability in the Mission District in San Francisco, where hipsters can be amply spotted riding fixies and toting canvas bags full of vinyls.
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At the very least, Locu has brought us one very insightful slew of data exploring the age-old question of whether PBR really is the hipster beer of choice.
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This makes Locu a powerful platform for the creation of a host of services that will complement and become value-added to already existing local-based businesses like Yelp and Foursquare.
Melinda Chung, director of product marketing at Locu, says that beyond helping merchants customize and publish their menus across the web, Locu is working on also adding an analytics dashboard.
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Visualizing product availability data on heat maps, Locu compared the availability of beers PBR and Bud Light, the latter of which is the most widely consumed beer in America.
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Afterward, people wanted to license his software and this led to the start of his own business and an entrepreneurial journey that would bring him around the world and ultimately to MIT where he met is Locu co-founders.
Locu is also working on gaining access to demand-side data, so that it can pair product availability data (from menus) with demand data (from sales) to see how the two work together, as well as what consumers are actually buying.
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Rather than hiring high-paid consultants to look into pricing and menu options, restaurants can turn to Locu to determine what menu items their competitors are offering that they might be missing out on, as well as details on pricing optimization.
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Originally founded at MIT and now boasting teammates in both Cambridge, Massachusetts and San Francisco, Locu is on a mission to connect local merchants and consumers, says its Director of Data Adam Marcus, which he says it does by finding, cleaning, and making available local merchant pricing and menu data, which can then be claimed and customized by merchants.
FORBES: Data Startup Confirms Hipster Meccas are PBR Hotbeds
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