Dimmi launches

Dimmi is the first and largest real-time, online restaurant reservation platform in Australia.

The launch of its new website, mobile website and iPhone application this week marks the end of several years of hard, collective work and the start of what will become the clear and best restaurant recommendation, review and booking website in Australia.

At Wiliam, we’re lucky to say we’ve been part of the ride since the very beginning.

The widget

Dimmi started life as a widget-based platform, integrated with the leading restaurant-review websites of Australia as well as thousands of the individual restaurant websites partaking in the Dimmi program.

Click onto a restaurant review at Eatability or The Good Food Guide and as long as the restaurant supports Dimmi, customers can make a real-time booking.

Click onto the restaurant’s own website, the same is true: simply locate the Dimmi Book Now button

As small as a widget might seem, serving literally millions of instances of the widget per month across thousands of websites is no small task.

Add that every widget can be customised, supports different billing models and must make real-time calls about availability and you have a fairly considerable technology on your hands.

Add to that a few other, not-inconsiderable functions.

Reporting

Restaurants receive extraordinary and graphically detailed reporting on their restaurants.

Who’s looking, who’s booking and what are they saying…

That’s right… saying

One of the best features of Dimmi are the reviews Dimmi has collected over the past few years. 

Hundreds of thousands of real diners who have eaten at the restaurant. Not fakes, not competitors.

Just people who have booked at Dimmi and told us how they felt and what they paid.

Which of course lets Dimmi tell you what you should expect to pay.

Who doesn’t like Deals!

Dimmi supports real-time deals.

If the chef has a stockpile of lobsters or wants to speed up Wednesday night, they enter into Dimmi and anyone booking through Dimmi can book the deal.

In real time.

All while being rewarded for it

Dimmi has an extraordinary and very generous rewards platform.

You get points for booking.

You get points for sharing your booking in social media. 

You get points for reviewing.

Enough points – you get cash back on a meal. $50 to be precise.

And so introducing the new Dimmi website…

To suggest that Dimmi has been as success up until now would be an understatement.

Restaurants love it. Diners love it. Literally, millions of covers booked through it.

Dimmi needed to be more however. Its potential, its data and what it offered diners was too compelling not to go further.

Together with the Dimmi team and the POS platform servicing the restaurants, we started building the Dimmi website almost 9 months back.

As simple as the website might seem, what is going on in the background is anything but.

The Dimmi website is a complex, hugely data-driven and real-time website supporting hundreds of functions including substantial websites relying on Dimmi including BigPond, Fairfax and Optus.

The result however, is fantastic.

Dimmi has launched a stylish, simple and highly compelling offer to the Australian retail market.

A standout B2C destination.

A revolution in eating out

What Dimmi delivers is a revolution in finding and booking restaurants.

Fundamentally, that one can book the restaurant in real-time and in confidence: huge departure from calling the phone number to find the number is disconnected, a fax number, unanswered at 10am or answered by Luigi who can be heard with his eraser misspelling your name and popping you near the front-door.

You of course arrive and pronounce your name 4 times to be told they put you down for 3 seats and not 5. Have a seat at the bar. Luigi is on it.

With Dimmi, you can see where your friends have eaten and what they rated the restaurant. You can also see real reviews from other punters. And how much they paid.

You can see the real, up-to-date menu, not the reviewer’s suggestion of the blue swimmer crab omelette, retired weeks after they ate there in 2008. You can see the price of the garlic bread through to the side salad.

You can compare restaurants. All supported by real data from real diners who said it was good for business meetings or late night rendezvous.

You can see real-time deals and take advantage of them.

And you are rewarded the whole way along.

Finding and booking restaurants not only becomes a breeze, it becomes scientific. You have real data and real reviews and the knowledge that you can book at your fingertips.

Why we’re proud

Dimmi is no small play and this week, it emerged as a serious Australian online brand. It was serious before, though from today, you’re really going to start hearing its name.

We’re only a part of the solution, though we’ve developed the technology and the different web interfaces the diner might see.

We’ve had different designers and developers, let alone Producers across the project since we started some four years ago.

Each has been an integral part of producing our share of the story.

Congratulations to Dimmi.

Of the startups we’ve been involved with – from Cudo to GetUp – Dimmi is an amazing rags-to-riches story and one that deserves the bright future its headed for.

We’re just proud to have played our part.