The event will be held on early May at Bavaro, Punta Cana which is one of the Caribbean’s most prominent tourist spots with hundreds of the most luxurious hotels and restaurants as well as the home of several prominent restaurant owners, chefs and chief executives of the Dominican Republic. And guess what? They are all invited.

As you might have guessed… We are extremely excited. Right now, we are hard at work and on track with our development plan. We are expecting to have the prototype ready a month before the event so we can test it thoroughly.

On another note, we finished our V2.0 website. It will feature more comprehensive information and a nicer look and feel. We are very proud!

That was all for this post. We’ll continue keeping you guys up to date! We are very thankful for all your support!

On January 23rd we launched our new website: http://www.smartmenuplus.com where we posted a video presenting our product. So far we’ve had 128 page views for the website, which is an average of more than 10 daily visits and our video has been played more than 160 times… not too shabby.

Early this week we also had a meeting where we took several important decisions for the direction we needed to take. We decided where to put our focus in terms of development, marketing and research.

Marketing and research

We decided to advertise heavily the product using mainly foursquare and also twitter and Facebook. Through foursquare we can do check-ins in hot restaurants and recommend users to visit our website so they can know the product and our company. We’ve been trying to generate buzz while we are hard at work trying to push a prototype “out of the oven” ASAP.

Website

We are also currently working on changing the website so we it can showcase our product better. We are aiming to launch the new site this weekend, Sunday morning at the latest.

Finally we decided to also have the website available in Spanish, so we can reach the Spanish speaking markets, such as the Dominican Republic, which is where we are aiming to have clients in our first stage. The video was finished yesterday (Click here) and we’ve been promoting it through all the social media channels we have available.

Development plan

Our development plan is presently in the works and we will comment more on this later.

We’ll continue providing more information on each entry and we’ll try to have several entries per week. Until the next one! Wish us luck and thanks for reading.

1. We finished our new product video which is live now!
2. Our development tablets just arrived, so we will start implementing our mockups on the next couple of days.
3. Our updated our TechStars application with respect to all progress that we have accomplished in the last days.

We have to say, that after several weeks of work, we are very satisfied with what we have accomplished, nevertheless we will keep working as hard as ever. This is race is just starting!

Our cartoon artist just delivered the remaining assets to us, so that means we will start preparing the new product video immediately. Furthermore we finished working on our website. Soon we will be ready to start developing SmartMenu+’s custom app.

The CAD design is ready. We are now in talk with several manufacturers in the Dominican Republic to see how much it will cost to build two cases for our development units.

Below you can see a glimpse of what we are cooking .

We have recorded all audio and videos that we are planning to use on the video. We received later in the day images of cartoons and started advancing with this while the rest is completed.

General development:

On January 13th we sent an email to several techstars members to receive feedback. Today, Jan 18th, we received an answer from Mr. Cohen. He suggested that we needed to validate our idea.

We talked to Garlic’s restaurant owner to propose a try & buy.

We finished writing the script for the video. We decided to contact a cartoon artist in order to advance as quickly as possible.

We have done great progress with the credit card reader tablet cover. CAD design is almost complete. We decided to have the reader on top to for easy swapping.

Product development:

Added some extra features to the “feature list”.

www.smarttmenuplus.com is still in development. We’ve decided to make the comments a central part of the website encouraging people to provide feedback on features they would like to see.

Social Media Strategy:

As soon as the website is completed we will start a aggressive social media campaign in order to receive more feedback from customer and potential clients.

Product Development:

We decided to create a 2 – 3 minute video to better present the SmartMenu+ idea. We decided to keep it simple: Flash animation with sketchy cartoons. We started to write the script for the video.

CAD designer started working on the cover. We are expecting to have this completed by the end of the week.

We also, reached out to CAD designers in order to get a sketch of the tablet cover with a credit card reader. This way we expect to receive an answer early on Monday.