In addition to mainstream tech trends like digital signage for restaurants, one of the easiest and most relevant ways to engage your customers is via mobile. See below for 15 apps that are popular, useful, and likely to bring you more revenue.

SOCIAL DISCOVERY

As millions of people turn to their phones every day for restaurant recommendations, it’s more important than ever that your business is not only visible, but recommended by others.

• Stamped lets users put their stamp of approval on the things they love (like restaurants & bars). Make sure your venue is being Stamped, because it’s a customer’s 5-star rating for all their friends to see.

• Foodspotting lets users search for specific dishes instead of restaurants. If you’ve got that special that everybody in town seems to love, make sure it’s visible here!

• Bite Hunter is a location-based app that gathers all the dining deals in your area and presents them in real-time. A mobile way to promote all your discounts & special offers.

• Foursquare, as you know, allows users to discover local businesses, check-in at their locations, synchronize with friends, save money, and find great deals. Every check-in means more visibility and loyalty for you.

• Yelp is still a reliable source to find businesses, read reviews, locate events, and even chat with other Yelpers about your restaurant. How are your ratings and comments?

 SIMPLIFYING POINT OF SALE 

Efficiency is everything, and several new POS apps for restaurants are making it faster, smoother, and easier to complete transactions with mobile devices.

• Square offers an incredibly convenient system for accepting credit cards from any location. The app includes a free card reader and functions with any mobile device.

• Intuit GoPayment is a great app for larger scale needs, allowing you to add up to 50 people on the same account and sync to QuickBooks is needed.

• Cashier not only lets you accept payments via mobile phone or iPod Touch, but you can also scan barcodes and manage inventory from a single mobile platform.

ENGAGING CUSTOMERS

Once they’re in the door, are your customers engaged with an on-site experience so they stay longer and buy more? Here are some easy ways to increase customer dwell time & sales.

• Roqbot replaces the background music at restaurants & bars with social music that lets customers engage directly from their phones -- like a 21^st century jukebox app. Roqbot's music is fully licensed and businesses keep control over what can be played.

• Spot On Trivia enables users to check in at select venues and compete against other guests in trivia challenges right from their smartphones.

MANAGING RESERVATIONS & LINES

To increase traffic, simplify the reservation process by letting your customers reserve tables or spots in line right from their smartphones.

• OpenTable, if you don’t already know, is a popular way for your customers to make reservations via mobile or web, and for you to manage easily on the business end.

• QLess transforms physical lines at restaurants into “virtual, mobile lines”, meaning users can reserve their spot, walk away & receive a text or call when their table’s ready. Less multitasking and more free time created for your staff.

• UrVenue is a complete management system, which controls your reservations, handles your customer database, records spending info, and much more.

YOUR OWN MOBILE SITE OR APP

Don’t just let your customers experience your restaurant through third-party apps. Enable them to navigate your own website or app and purchase on the spot.

• ChowNow creates custom-built apps (iPhone, Android, iPad and Facebook) for your restaurant, giving customers the convenience and freedom to engage anytime.

• Snapit Mobile helps restaurants with the easy first step in mobile – optimizing your website so it’s presentable and functional on the smartphone interface.

We hope you get a chance to see a wide range of NRA Show trends and new restaurant technologies in the coming week. There are always more great restaurant apps, so let us know what you would add to the list!

While thousands of savvy new products can be found at the National Restaurant Association show, most restaurant owners & managers we've talked to are looking for technology that will directly increase sales. That's why we wrote this post. See below for our forecast of this year's NRA show trends that are proving to boost both service AND business.

1.  Not Customer Service. Customer Engagement.

Are you engaging your customers and getting them hooked on something fun while they’re there?

Going beyond sports on your TVs and social media "check-ins", a wave of new engagement services are designed to make your customers stay longer, purchase more and bring their friends to your location. Keep your eye out for mobile recommendation gaming, fun restaurant music apps, automated restaurant orders (from your table), and other digital engagement tools at the NRA show and throughout the year.

2.  Not Background Music. Social Music.

Every few seconds, somebody tweets a complaint about the background music at a restaurant or bar they're visiting. Luckily, for all of us, background music is being replaced by social music.

New innovations in music service for business, like the popular Roqbot, make your venue's music social, so customers can engage directly from their phones, while you remain in control. A San Francisco venue called Bar Basic using Roqbot recently cited increased traffic, longer engagement, and a sales boost of 26 percent. Also, check out other music apps like Shazam, which allow patrons to discover the music they like at your restaurant and share with friends.

3.  Not TV Display. Customized Display.

As you know, digital signage is the modern medium for restaurants, cafés, and bars to engage with customers while they’re on site. You can expect a wide variety of digital signage solutions fighting for attention at this year's 2012 NRA show.

In addition to showing sports games, restaurants are customizing the display on their screens to feature their own specials, upcoming events, and other promotions to drive on-site purchases. For example, the presence of large digital menu boards has been linked to direct sales. However, non-QSR locations often wish to avoid over-advertising and therefore choose an entertainment or social music display to balance promotions with something fun for customers.

4.  Not mobile toys. Mobile tools.

To cap off our list of restaurant trends,  we encourage you to look closely at the consumer electronics that you and other people love.

To some, the iPad and other tablets are just expensive toys that are worth your investment. However, you can expect this year's restaurant technology trends to feature the iPad as everything from an upscale, interactive wine list to a head chef's mobile cookbook. If you have a tablet yourself, think about how mobile devices can deliver everyday value to your restaurant or bar as tools.

NRA Show, Chicago - May 5th - 8th, 2012

If you’re going to the NRA show this year in Chicago, let us know what else we should add to this list! To find out more about how customer engagement, social music, customized display or mobile tools can drive sales for your restaurant or bar, feel free to contact us any time at info@roqbot.com.

While brands and venues in Austin battled for the attention of SXSW attendees, Miller Lite and fifteen of the city’s most popular bars were drawing crowds with a new social music app.

Tech and music fans alike stormed the fifteen hot spots running Roqbot’s mobile jukebox service, as each venue took its music out of the background and put it in the hands of customers.

What were SXSW attendees rocking to? See below for the top ten most played songs on Roqbot during the Miller Lite Beer For The People program!

Top Ten Most Played:

1. Gotye - Somebody That I Used To Know
2. Foster the People - Pumped Up Kicks    
3. Ghostland Observatory - Sad Sad City  
4. M83 - Midnight City   
5. Miike Snow - Animal  
6. Beastie Boys - Sabotage
7. MGMT - Electric Feel
8. Cage the Elephant - Ain't No Rest For The Wicked      
9. Pretty Lights - Hot Like Sauce
10. Modest Mouse - Float On

Miller Lite and Roqbot began the program in February with a sweepstakes to win SXSW 2012 badges through the mobile jukebox app. The promotion then continued through March, as Miller Lite offered unlimited free song credits to all customers at the Austin bars and ran another sweepstakes for free badges to SXSW 2013.

Congratulations to all the Miller Lite Beer For The People sweepstakes winners who entered through Roqbot -- we're looking forward to seeing you in 2013!

Although this year's Beer For The People giveaway is over, you can still influence the bar music at great Austin bars such as Corner Bar, Bling Pig Pub, and Stompin Grounds.  Be sure to download our mobile jukebox app, grab a Miller Lite and get in on the excitement.  If you're not in Austin, go tell your favorite venues to get Roqbot!

To gear up for the big release of their fourth studio album – Journey Through the Shadows – on May 8^th,we’ll be featuring The Parlotones’ new single Save Your Best Bits on Roqbot over the coming weeks, as well as giving away tickets to their upcoming shows in LA, San Francisco and Austin through the Roqbot app. Next time you’re at a Roqbot venue, check in, play the band’s new track, enter the giveaway, and let us know if you dig the sound!

The Parlotones are fresh off a successful world-wide tour in 2011, and they're already set to take their new music on the road for another 27-city circuit beginning May 17th at the Roxy in Los Angeles. However, before touring here in the US, the band will be giving back by joining celebrities, government officials, and African citizens to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro in an effort to support the Africa-UNiTE campaign.

We’re excited to feature the new single and hope to see you at a Parlotones show soon. In the meantime, you can download their new single Save Your Best Bits, pre-order the new album, and check out Parlotones Passport, a new interactive promotion that allows fans to connect with the band, earn reward points and get special access to shows by getting involved.

Go check out the new single with Roqbot and tell us what you think!

We’re at South by Southwest this week, and today we’re spending some time with this year’s finalists at the SXSW Music Accelerator – a competition between the best new music companies in the tech industry.

Last year, over four hundred companies entered the contest, and after some tough competition, our team here at Roqbot won the Grand Prize and was named Best Music Tech Company at SXSW. However, we’re big supporters of the other finalists from last year and wanted to highlight each of them now – one year later – to share an update on all of their progress.

RootMusic/BandPage (San Francisco CA) makes the application BandPage on Facebook with over 31 million unique users a month. RootMusic's BandPage now services Facebook Pages for 500,000 artists, which is up 250,000 over the last six months. They're also launching a Billboard chart along with new features that integrate with Facebook’s Timeline.

Next Big Sound (Boulder, CO) tracks hundreds of thousands of artists across multiple websites and social networks, and lets professionals in the music industry see social media data, traffic and other data all in one centralized dashboard. Next Big Sound is currently expanding with a new office in New York City and has partnered with Billboard to launch their new Social 50 list.

Air Guitar Ltd (Monmouth, United Kingdom) makes a product called the AiR Guitar, which turns a band t-shirt into an instrument, using a webcam and an augmented reality website. In 2011, the company won Best Bootstrapped Music Company at SXSW and is likely rocking out with their augmented reality-enabled t-shirt somewhere at SXSW this very moment.

algoriddim (Munich, Germany) specializes in cutting-edge audio and multimedia applications for Mac, iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch. The company’s djay product was featured among the best apps in App Store Rewind 2011, and djay for iPad was selected as the “iPad App of the Year” in Germany, UK, France, and many other countries, as well as the first runner-up in the U.S.

Exfm (New York, NY) is a browser extension for Chrome that runs in the background while you browse, creating a music library from every MP3 file you find. Recently, the company has advanced from around 75,000 active users to more than 300,000 and going strong.

Herd (Ontario, Canada) is a music service for mobile device users hoping to discover and share local music. Recently, Herd debuted a new mobile iteration that focuses more on sharing tunes with friends and getting recommendations.

Shuffler.fm (NE, Amsterdam) is an audio magazine made by music blogs, where you can navigate thousands of music blogs without having to weed through them all. Late last year, the startup expanded by launching an iPad app curating blogs and content in a Flipboard-style layout of words, pictures, and streaming audio.

Congratulations and best of luck to all of these great companies in 2012.  And finally, take a minute to check out all the contenders at this year’s SXSW Accelerator, and tell us your favorites in the comments. We'll post an update soon with a detailed look at the big winners of 2012.

The mobile app revolution has already begun, and if you haven't already, now is the perfect time to get involved. From interactive games to GPS navigation, there is currently an app for just about everything. In the business world and for small business owners, in particular, this translates into more opportunities for reaching your customers and for providing a variety of simple solutions that can quickly improve your business!

We invite you to explore Roqbot and the wide range of other business apps that may be right for you. Here are a few examples of mobile apps that we have found to be most helpful:

HootSuite -- A social media application, which enables you to monitor and update multiple social media networks at once. HootSuite provides an easy to use platform, and is a great way to boost your social media marketing campaign and boost your online presence even when you're on the go!

Office@Hand -- A downloadable business phone system that can affordably mobilize your business in minutes! Office@Hand delivers a complete phone package that connects all your employees no matter their locations, and can give any small business more flexibility and the capacity to run smoother without the expensive IT costs and extensive setup time.

WebEx -- A mobile conferencing program that allows you to partake in meetings from wherever you are. With WebEx, you can share documents, conduct presentations, and video conference with anyone all from your mobile device!

We are here to help you recognize the current value of mobile apps and how they can immediately impact your business's productivity, efficiency, and customer experience. If you are interested in learning more about mobile apps like Roqbot, please contact us at info@roqbot.com and we will be happy to guide you!

Gap customers who use Roqbot will not only get a big break on their purchases, but will also be part of a first for fashion retail, and a music experience they’ve likely never had while shopping. So, come claim your Gap discount soon and shop to your favorite music!

*For media inquiries regarding Gap’s discount via Roqbot, or Roqbot’s new retail offering, please contact us at info@roqbot.com.

To celebrate our launch of Social Music for Retail, as well as our new iPhone and Android app updates, all song requests this weekend at Roqbot venues will be free. Check in to any of our locations listed below and catch a break on drinks, shopping, and most importantly, your favorite songs!

Still don’t have Roqbot? Download our iPhone or Android app today and share with your friends, so you can hear your favorite music for free, wherever you go this weekend. Cheers!

San Francisco

The Gap (Chestnut Street)
Bar Basic
Tope
The Boardroom
World Gym

Los Angeles

Bolt Barbers Downtown LA
Bolt Barbers Monkey House
Elat Burger

Boston

GymIt
Howard Thurman Center

HELLO, RETAIL!

Roqbot now replaces traditional background music services in your favorite stores – from enterprise retail companies to small local businesses. The offering provides each store with a dynamic stream and a customized music library from our six million song master catalog.  The Roqbot music stream is delivered to each business via an internet-connected digital media player, which also allows for advanced programming functionality. Like Roqbot’s service for bars, restaurants and gyms, standard features include playlists scheduled by time of day and a stream that automatically adjusts to the preferences of customers in the store.

Customize the Shopping Experience

Upon arriving at the store, shoppers use Roqbot’s iPhone or Android app to “check in”, browse a customized catalog, request their favorite music (from holiday tunes to recent hits), and vote on others’ song picks – like a social jukebox app. Roqbot also incorporates top social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter and foursquare, so users can share their favorite songs with friends and connect with other “DJs” using the service. Additionally, shoppers who use Roqbot will discover exclusive discounts and rewards through the app.

Engaging Customers with In-Store Music

The Roqbot retail offering also features in-store digital displays to create a rich visual experience for customers while reinforcing the retailer’s promotional efforts. The screens display the song that is currently playing, users who have “checked in”, and product images. Together, Roqbot’s mobile app and on-screen display provide retailers with a multi-channel branded music experience, while also driving dwell time and purchases from holiday consumers.

In working with businesses, we have seen great value in reaching consumers while they’re actually at the point of purchase. By engaging customers with a mobile app and digital displays in the store, Roqbot picks up where many other location-based networks leave off – the on-site experience.  In addition, the location-specific Roqbot music library enables a hyper-local music discovery experience, and we’re excited to work with partners like Noise Pop and A2IM on featuring up-and-coming artists.

Cisco Powered Digital Signage

To ensure high-quality audio and visual streaming for retailers, Roqbot has partnered with consumer networking leader Cisco Systems, Inc. and is currently using the company’s new digital media player and displays at the Chestnut Street Gap store in San Francisco. In addition to serving enterprise companies like Gap, the Roqbot system is easily run by businesses of all sizes through a web browser or on other digital media players such as Google TV and Roku.

Jukebox Anywhere

Our goal is to let you engage with the music anywhere you go. With this new offering and Cisco partnership, Roqbot brings to market a business music service that meets the needs of enterprise retailers and adds to the excitement of this year’s holiday shopping experience.

For media inquiries regarding Roqbot’s new retail offering, please contact us at info@roqbot.com.

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