Opentable was born of frustration. Why, asked Chuck Templeton, its founder, can I book a seat on an aeroplane online but not in a restaurant? So Mr Templeton set out to build an online service of his own, starting in San Francisco. In a fragmented industry of small family businesses, that meant signing up restaurants one by one. What made it harder still was that the year was 1998, when many restaurants did not even have internet connections. So OpenTable not only had to persuade restaurateurs to take its software, it often had to supply hardware too.
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