Blog

Following a glowing review of a new Thai restaurant in my neighborhood in Wednesday's New York Times, I decided to try ordering in for dinner last night. The trouble was that I only half-remembered the restaurant's name. My plan was to look up the Times review, plug the name into MenuPages and figure out what to order. As luck would have it, however, the Internet connection in my apartment went down right at dinnertime and the soonest a technician could be dispatched was next Tuesday (thank you Time Warner). Calling information was out of the question because a) I have VoIP at home (which wouldn't work because the non-functioning Internet connection), and b) I still didn't know the restaurant's name.

On to Plan B, which entailed trying to follow the same path, only on my mobile device, a BlackBerry Curve. Getting to nytimes.com presented no problem, but the fact that BlackBerry defaults to the Times' mobile site did, because the mobile site doesn't appear to index all of the content from nytimes.com (or if it does, I couldn't find it). After 10 minutes of fruitless browsing in search of the Dining section, I switched gears and fired up the Opera Mini browser, which does provide access to the same nytimes.com site you get on your PC, and found the name pretty quickly.

Next stop: MenuPages. An added twist was that the restaurant had a hyphenated name, and MenuPages requires an exact match in order to pull up results. That added several more minutes of frustration. Finally, I was able to pull it up but neither the JavaScript pop-up menu nor the downloadable PDF version would work on either mobile browser. A half an hour into this ordeal and watching as the clock ticked past nine, I gave up and dialed the restaurant, planning to just wing my order based on a few dishes mentioned in the review. By the time I got through, they were no longer doing delivery, so overwhelmed were they by the volume of diners streaming in because of the mention in the Times.

Bottom line: mobile search, whether through the engines or on content sites, still leaves something to be desired. It works relatively well when you know exactly what you want, but it falls short when a hungry diner like I was last night knows what he doesn't know and what he needs to find out. In retrospect, I should have plugged "thai restaurant" and the zip code into Google and found the restaurant that way, but I was stuck on re-reading the review and getting a sense of what to order. Next time, I'll know better.

• European data roaming traffic grew by 75% between April 2007 and 2008.
• The numbers of 3G users doubled
• The average price of data roaming services fell by 25%
• The European mobile data market which now stands at 7bn euros (£5.53bn) -  40% rise
• The average cost of sending a SMS while travelling in Europe fell by 18%
• Mobile broadband services now cost as much as fixed line broadband services in some countries

Add to this the spread of affordable 3G dongles for laptops, and access on the move can only continue to grow.

 Another hat tip to ST for this. 

Here's a message from our CEO Oliver Bishop:

"Gooday, Good Morning, and Howdy!

People say they can't believe that we are already three years old, and those who have been around since the start will be thinking that it was only yesterday we were huddled around one desk in Cleveland Street. 

2007 was an incredibly successful, busy year for us all. We won clients including John Lewis and British Gas. We opened two new offices in New York and Melbourne. We started Steak Creative. We doubled our headcount. We recruited industry legends Robert Campbell and Matthew Clark to our board. We raised funding. We WON the following awards:

• Interactive Marketing and Advertising Awards (IMAA) 2007 - Media Agency of the Year
• Daily Mail /Make Your Mark Enterprising Young Brits Award 2007 - winner of Best High Growth Business
• Growing Business Young Entrepreneur of the Year 2007
• Courvoisier The Future 500

We were also shortlisted in the events below:

• IMAA 2007 Finalist for Best Use of Search Marketing for swiftcover.com
• Start Up Awards 2007 Young Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist
• Marketing Week Effectiveness Awards -Agency of the Year Finalist 2007
• OMMA Awards 2007 - Finalist for Best Search Campaign for swiftcover.com
• MIXX Awards 2007 - Finalist in International category
• NMA Effectiveness Awards 2007 - Finalist Retail Category for swiftcover.com
• IMAA 2007 Finalist for Best Use of Search Marketing for swiftcover.com
• The Sharp Edge Awards 2006 - Finalist for Best Customer Service

And most importantly Penny the Cow arrived from Marseille.

On behalf of Tony, Duncan, Julian and myself I'd like to thank everybody who has contributed to our success so far - our suppliers, our clients and of course our employees, past and present. It has been a real privilege working with you all, and we thank all our staff from the bottom of our hearts for all the tremendous effort and hard work you have given to Steak over the last three years. You really do go beyond the call of duty.

Enjoy the company parties! Here's to another stellar three years.

Ollie Bishop, CEO"