One of the things I believe may help make the new gTLD domain names more appealing to small businesses is if there are special products or services associated with the TLD that can only be used in conjunction with a particular TLD. Rightside, through a proprietary (yet to be named) platform, will be offering One.Menu, a product targeting restaurants who want to operate websites on .Menu domain names that allow people to easily see dining menus no matter what browser they are using.
Many restaurants have trouble displaying their menus on their website without having to use pdf files. The One.Menu product will allow restaurants to create customer friendly websites with an easy to use website editing tool. There are many designs that restaurants can choose from, and it looks like it will be easy to add products, descriptions, pricing, and photos. The product will be especially helpful for restaurants to create mobile-friendly menus and menus that can be viewed on phones, desktop computers, tablets, and other devices.
Although Rightside is not the registry operating the .Menu TLD, they are working with WhatBox?, the company that will be operating the .Menu registry to offer this product to registrants. The cost will be minimal, and the company is banking on restaurants to continue using the service in perpetuity. .Menu domain names just went up for sale yesterday. According to Rightside’s Nick Nelson, “The launch of one.menu directly aligns with the Rightside mission statement. This new platform will allow Rightside to help people define and present their business’s online.”
In addition to this menu product, the platform has a number of other similar services in the offing to help registrants who will operate on other TLDs, including some Rightside-managed domain names. The goal is to create a product that is beneficial to small business owners, which will encourage them to register the new domain names, pay for the add-on services, and continue to renew both.
There are other companies who offer website development tools to their clients, but this is going to be different because the new gTLD domain names are so targeted. The Rightside platform can specifically target different markets and tailor a product to fit the needs of businesses in those verticals.
The company was smart to secure OneMenu.com, which redirects to OneMenu.CO. There is a message the company is making here with the .com – .CO redirection.
I guess that’s how it’s going to be. You will have to do defensive registrations. I acquired virtual.company for personal use. Now I am thinking if I should go ahead and acquire the .com
It is clear that a comment I wrote earlier today on DNW (…now entering it’s 3rd hour awaiting ‘moderation’) in response to a .menu-related article is equally, if not more relevant to the post here:
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… I agree that .menu is arguably one of the better new gTLD extensions that might lend itself to a “standard convention/platform” (like .tel) for restaurants to publish their menus. But, this sort of “standard convention/platform” idea should have been pushed much further IMO …
IF I had been in charge of the .menu launch, knowing that 10-15 closely related food/restaurant extensions were to come, I would have ensured some sort of unique ‘back-end’ application was co-launched with the .menu introduction. For example, most small and medium size restaurants (and arguably the majority of large restaurants too) rely SOLELY on in-person ordering or telephone orders for pick up and/or delivery. Except for a select few large restaurant chains, on-line ordering (for pick-up or delivery) is the exception.
Imagine if the .menu registry had partnered with a firm able to offer ‘order taking’ and ‘payment processing’ for telephone and/or online orders. Even if just launched initially in the US, all you would need to start is 1 central online/call ‘center’ to manage the process of collecting telephone and/or online orders, payment processing, customer service solutions, etc. Coupled with…
a) inexpensive technology (e.g. a tablet/station that relays the order & delivery address to the specific member restaurant); and/or
b) innovative apps (such as small GPS ‘pagers’ that each restaurant assigns to their delivery drivers; allowing all online orders to be ‘tracked’ in real time; forever eliminating the typical 30-min post order “where’s my food” customer call-backs); and
c) the ability to easily ‘scale’ the online/call center as required,
…and the introduction of .menu could have been a business in-and-of-itself, clearly differentiating it from its’ soon-to-be gTLD competitors.
It is surprising to me that a registry like .menu (in what will prove to be a highly competitive ‘restaurant/food’ name-space) would invest $350,000+ for the extension, yet NOT offer any differentiating technology or partnership programs to coincide with the launch of their extension. What is the .menu “unique selling point” (USP) vis-à-vis the other soon to come ‘restaurant/food’ extensions?
Perhaps the bigger question: Where is the “innovation” that should be coupled with all these thousands of new gTLD launches?
Steve
Sometimes we can’t approve comments right away. I am sure Andrew didn’t keep it in the queue intentionally.
Normally I’d agree, except 6 comments left after mine was submitted have been approved. And, although some were likely ‘auto-approvals’ given their known authorship; others seem doubtful as auto-approval qualifiers (like one authored from ‘China’ without links to authenticating sites).
No worries – I am sure it will eventually be reviewed & released.
🙂
On some blogs, like mine, if a commenter has ever posted a comment with the same email / name combo, it’s automatically approved. Perhaps those comments have been automatically approved. He also might have a whole bunch of unmoderated comments in queue and hasn’t gotten to them yet.
Our goal with one.menu is to answer a problem. A problem with PDF menus and a lack of restaurants online specifically. What we struggled to avoid doing is entering a very very competetive market space where you have billion dollar IPO companies like JustEat (in much of the world) and GrubHub/Seamless already dominating the food ordering world.
With all these companies, they still have not been able to convince restaurants to get away from PDF menus.
Hardware wise, we do anticipate a day where paper menus are extinct and everyone is using tablets to view their menus. You have NTNBuzztime (BWW), E la carte (Applebees) and Ziosk (Chilis) all with anchor restaurants in that world already.
We couldn’t agree with you more that we think .menu deserves a “Standard platform” – where we might disagree is I think we’ve built that in One.Menu.