TipCity Offers Search Engine for Diners, Enables Local Restaurants to “Flash Deals”

As the entrepreneur who successfully pioneered Bluetooth software at San Diego’s Widcomm (now part of Broadcom), Hiep Pham is accustomed to taking some calculated risks. Today, he is betting that consumers will respond to “flash deals” for restaurant discounts that are sent to their mobile devices by text message or e-mail, and are displayed on their favorite social media sites.

Pham describes TipCity, a San Diego-based startup he founded last year, as a location-based marketing tool that connects tech-savvy diners to real-time, hyper-local restaurant deals.

The company’s technology could sound the final death knell for old media restaurant coupons. It represents a more precise way to target customers than existing subscriber-based daily or weekly deals that are blanket-e-mailed to a group database. TipCity says its technology enables restaurants and other partners to transmit promotions instantly to customers who identified their favorite restaurants and taste preferences when they signed up at TipCity.com, which is currently in beta development.

Through its mobile applications, online presence, and social media integration, TipCity says its technology can reach customers in real time, just when they’re leaving a theater and looking for something to eat or drink. In addition to driving traffic to its restaurant customers, the startup says it also helps restaurants and other partners better manage their revenues and inventory by enabling them to offer instant promotions during a business lull. Participating restaurants in San Diego include Pat & Oscar’s, Pick Up Stix, and Donovan’s Steak House, and the company says it plans to expand to other markets in coming months.

TipCity’s founders provided the initial startup capital, and additional financing has come from former Burger King CEO Jeff Campbell and Tony Thornley, a former president and CFO at San Diego-based Qualcomm. Pham tells me by e-mail that the company is planning to engage with venture capitalists to raise its series A funding in the next few weeks.

The company says its “flash deals” also will be promoted on TipCity’s website, Facebook, and Twitter pages, as well as an iPhone App, Droid App, and on the websites of its promotional partners.

The company says its controlled marketing gives restaurant operators unprecedented flexibility, for example, by increasing walk-in traffic at a popular lunch spot by offering a half-off lunch deal on a rainy day—good for two hours only. TipCity says it also offers its subscribers in San Diego the largest database for restaurant deals, promotions, and happy hours discounts. In a statement issued by the company, Pham says, “It’s like the Google search of restaurant deals.”

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.