Smartphone app helps in restaurant seating

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PITTSBURGH, Jan. 3 (UPI) -- A smartphone app may make it easier to wait for a table at your favorite restaurant by alerting you by text when it's ready, its U.S. developer said.

NoWait, available to restaurants on a monthly subscription, is designed to do away with the large, sometimes awkward buzzing pagers handed out by restaurants to customers on a table wait list, replacing it with the convenience of alerting customers by text on their own smartphone or tablet, ZDNet reported Thursday.

"If you use a buzzer, you just write things down," NoWait founder Robb Myer said. "NoWait gives you a name, phone number. You can track interactions, including how long they have been waiting, and how long it takes for them to get back when you alert them."

NoWait is attractive from the customers' point of view because they can use the wait time to run nearby errands or just move away from the crowd at the restaurant without worrying about being out of the pager range, he said.

More than 1,200 locations are using NoWait across the United States, ZDNet said, although it currently only runs on Apple iOS tablets and smartphones.

NoWait is based in Pittsburgh and reportedly has received $2 million in venture capital.