UrbanSpoon will charge its customers a subscription fee of $99 per month and a $1 fee for every reservation that is made through its system (reservations through UrbanSpoon's widget will be free).

The application will store its data on UrbanSpoon's servers. Besides allowing restaurants to manage their reservations, the service will also include a customer relationship management database.

Manage Your Restaurant with the iPad

As Lowry told us, the iPad is an ideal device in the restaurant context, as it gives the host far more mobility than the regular large terminal that you can find in most restaurants today. Besides that, Lowry noted, the iPad is also very "cool and sexy," something that a lot of restaurateurs appreciate.

With this move, UrbanSpoon is clearly invading OpenTable's territory. According to Lowry, restaurateurs never really had an alternative to OpenTable until now. With over 8 million users, UrbanSpoon's iPhone app is already one of the most popular restaurant-related mobile apps and given that the company offers a cheaper subscription price and runs on relatively cheap hardware, the company, which has been working on this service ever since Apple announced the iPad, has a chance to make a dent in OpenTable's market.

Not Just for Lunch

While the name implies that Lunchwalla is only focused on getting people together for lunch, the site won't stop you from organizing breakfast, brunch, dinner or happy hour get-togethers.

After you have sent out your invitations, you contacts can vote for different restaurants right in their email clients. Once everybody has voted (or decided not to attend), you can make the final decision and your contacts will get one more email with the finalized details. After the event is over, you can also upload photos from the meal and share them with your friends.

One nice aspect of the site is that it allows you to pick a set of favorite restaurants, so if you decide to use the service regularly, you won't have to pick and choose the same restaurants again. You can also group your contacts into lists.

Privacy

One aspect of the site that not everybody will appreciate, however, is that - by default - all your invitations, comments and events are public and will appear on your profile page. If you want to keep your lunch plans private, make sure that you change the privacy settings for your profile. Even then, though, the event page remains visible to anybody who has access to the URL.

Events planners would be well served to check out the software; it's not just free and extensible, it's also quite full-featured right out of the box.

If you like the scheduling service Sched.org that was popularized at SXSW, but would like to build out an even more sophisticated system for yourself, OpenConferenceWare could be a good option. We learned about it on the Portland local tech blog Silicon Florist.

"Events scheduling 2.0" apps are not uncommon in the tech industry (Pathable is another well known cutting edge app in this market) but Koshevoy and Beels have said that their goal in making OpenConferenceWare a free and open source is "to empower other people so they can better organize and participate in more events that support free sharing of information, open society, and involved citizenry."

A little navigation around the Open Source Bridge conference schedule shows that such a package can be not just empowering for organizers and developers, but very pleasing for users as well.

This is the problem that Setster was designed to solve. On the back end, once registered, the Setster user can set up their business information, work hours, service providers, basic services with cost if any, choice of widget style and maybe some important clients. Users can also manually enter appointments on the calendar once everything else is set up, as well as approve, make changes to, or reject unverified or unconfirmed appointments. On the front end, users are given a Setster URL that they can give to their customer to schedule appointments, or they can take the widget code and embed it in their own business web page.

From the client end, there is access to a very simple-to-use widget either from the business web site (after set-up) or the Setster provider-specific site, where a client can choose an appointment time and fill out the rest of the details, and then click on an email confirmation link. The service takes care of reminding the provider (the Setster user) of the appointment and confirming it on their end. Alerts can also be set for important appointments.

Finally, the site has been tuned to also work with small business that may have several employees all with busy calendars. One login allows selecting which employee calendar to look at, and choosing the next available appointment slot either for one employee specifically, or across all the calendars (first available). This can be a great help in a business like a hair salon where the customer may not need to choose the same person each time.

There are a couple of downsides to be considered. First, there doesn't seem to be a way to import or export calendar data from Setster. It seems to assume that a company will start off using this software and love it so much they will never want to migrate to anything else. Second, the site indicates that the service isn't going to be free, or that perhaps there will be tiered pricing. However, we couldn't find any suggestion for how much it would cost to use Setster after it emerges from beta, so you might want to get signed up and test it now if the concept appeals to you.

TimeBridge's stand-out feature is the simplicity with which it gives recipients alternative times and dates for each appointment. The appointment organizer sends out invitations with five optional times, and attendees are requested to select "Yes," "No," or "Best." If a particular time appears to be the "Best" for all attendees, TimeBridge will automatically set it as the time of the appointment. Otherwise, TimeBridge notifies the organizer of the alternatives and awaits confirmation.

We'll go into TimeBridge and other scheduling applications, such as Doodle and Tungle, in more detail in an upcoming post.