Dialing In a Lobster Dinner From Highway 24

We at Lamorinda Patch like to think we’re writing on the Web-based, hyper-local, search-engine-optimized, adjective-heavy, razor’s edge of technology. Things get to moving plenty fast on the cutting edge and sometimes it’s easy to overlook how  technology has changed the way we interact, do business, educate, and govern. 

Understanding technology isn’t so much about understanding how it works as much as it is about understanding how it affects people and society.  This series is an attempt to gauge some of the changes that have taken place in our quiet little corner of the world.

Our objective is not to create a complete compendium of technological change in Lamorinda, but to spark consideration and conversation about how, or if, we’re different as people and as a community because of how we use technology.

Searching for the Right Restaurant and a Late-Night Dinner - by iPhone  

It’s a brisk February night in downtown Lafayette and people on the street move with purpose, eager to get inside out of the cold.

Light from streetlamps and storefronts beckons a wave of late commuters flowing down Mt. Diablo Blvd.  Vanessa Padon, of Moraga, and Steve Greinetz, of Orinda, are among them, in need of a good restaurant and time together at the end of a long day.

Neither has the patience or time to spend calling restaurants for last-minute reservations, but today they don’t have to bother - Padon has booked a table at  using an online reservation service called Open Table.  She’s used the service for the last eight or ten years, but recently it’s become even more convenient.

“I like just being able to pull up the app,” says Padon, holding up her iPhone.

The technology allows customers like Padon and Greinetz to quickly and conveniently book a table, but it also provides Yankee Pier chef and partner Michael Dunn and his staff powerful, timesaving management tools.  Not only do they save staff time booking what Dunn estimates are up to half of the restaurants reservations, it helps them maximize seating capacity, as well as build a customer database.

“We use it to build email lists,” to help keep customers up to date on special events or menu additions, he says.

Steven Farrell, the manager at Yankee Pier, highlights an even deeper change brought about not so much by a particular application, like Open Table, but by the broader use of computers over the last eighteen years.

“When I was waiting tables, I used to write it on a piece of paper,” he says.  Now, everything is entered into a point-of-sale, or POS, computer.

Edward Zeidan, owner of computer service and support company in Lafayette, says that the last decade and a half has seen the growth of computers across all types and sizes of businesses.

“The cost of computers had dropped so dramatically,” he explains, “that businesses are now far more likely to have networks even for small offices of just a few machines.”

Yankee Pier and its Lark Creek parent company are examples of that trend.  Dunn says they use different software that pulls information from the POS and other networked computers to create reports to help manage things like food costs, scheduling, and product mixes.

“We used to do that by ourselves by hand,” he says.  The ability of computers to process and manipulate information allows users to look at trends by day, week, month, or year.  Dunn cited an example with the recent Valentine’s Day holiday, “I can look at what I did last year and schedule and make adjustments.”

Now that such tools are widely used, the new trend is making that kind of power portable, says Zeidan.  He points to the rise of “cloud computing,” technology designed to allow users to keep information with a service provider on the Internet and access it through any Web-enabled device.

Next Time On Tech Front: We'll explore the changes taking place as businesses and business people start looking to the “cloud.”