Gurunavi Touch (ぐるなびタッチ)

» see gnavi.co.jp/touch/ as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Gurunavi is the restaurant-listings company, the thing you opened in Japan to find somewhere to eat, and on 3 September 2007 it put hardware into the restaurants themselves. The press release five days earlier described the install in one line: the restaurant plugs a dedicated terminal into a power outlet. That is the entire deployment. Nothing had to be wired into the till, and nobody had to sign a contract with a payments processor. A box, a socket.

The launch release is unusually frank about the problem it was solving, and the problem was paper. Restaurants had told Gurunavi that their stamp cards cost more than they returned and were a nuisance to run, and that some could not justify printing them at all. Customers had the mirror complaint: a wallet fills up with other people's stamp cards, and the day you forget one is the day you do not get the thing you earned.

What the box did is the part worth preserving, because it is not what FeliCa is usually remembered for. You held your wallet phone against it and the phone opened a URL. The chip was being used as a trigger for a web session rather than as a payment instrument or an identity card, which meant the restaurant never touched your money and the service never had to settle anything. What you got back was a visit stamp and something for next time.

At launch it asked nothing of you. The campaign page is almost indignant about it: free and simple to operate, and registration is not even required. The handset requirement is where the edges of the thing show, and it states more plainly than anything else who could never have reached it. Any FeliCa handset on any of the three carriers would do, and on docomo only from the 902i and 702i onward. A sentence like that is a complete description of a country.

~ the record ~

~ the drift from stamps to points ~

The stamp card proper arrived on 29 November 2007, a few months after launch: collect enough visits, trade them for something. In November 2008 a layer called ぐるまー went on top, which gave you a title based on how many times you had touched a terminal, up to 伝説の大食漢, the legendary big eater, along with daily quizzes and a map that logged itself. From August 2009 a restaurant could buy a handheld version of the terminal outright for 5,250 yen including tax.

Then the slow conversion into something more ordinary. The June 2011 release is the pivot, and its pitch is worth reading twice: coupon authentication, sold as a brake on the discount-coupon price war, because a restaurant could finally check who was actually a regular before handing anything over. Gurunavi expected expensive restaurants that had always refused to issue coupons to come in on that basis. By then the service was also wired into Gurunavi's own points currency and a JAL mileage tie-in, and the thing that had needed no account now opened with a line saying you have to register first. By 2013 the description had become points you collect and points you pay with. It had gone from a stamp you did not have to sign up for to a loyalty scheme that would not start without you.

~ nine thousand restaurants ~

The curve is published and dated at every step. About 3,500 restaurants by the end of November 2007, roughly doubling to 7,000 by October 2008. The count reaches about 9,000 in October 2012, which is the best late-life figure anyone put in writing. One caution on a number that looks like a collapse: a 2011 release mentions about 3,000 restaurants, but that is the rollout cohort for a new version of the terminal rather than the installed base, and reading it as a fall from seven thousand would be wrong.

The target set at launch was ten thousand restaurants within the 2007 financial year. It took five more years to get within a thousand of it. No user count or member count was ever published, and neither was any figure for how many times a terminal was actually touched. Restaurants were the number Gurunavi was selling, so restaurants were the number it counted.

~ a sticker did it for free ~

The engineering had been walking away from the chip for a while. From June 2011 the newer terminals accepted phones with no FeliCa in them at all. In 2012 there was an NFC trial run jointly with all three carriers across a hundred Tokyo restaurants, and a field test where handsets without the chip displayed a QR code on screen for a member of staff to scan with a tablet. Each of those is a step toward not needing the powered box.

The farewell sits on the product's own front page, dated to the minute: Gurunavi Touch ended service at 23:59 on Monday 30 June 2014, and on Tuesday 1 July a new smartphone-only check-in service called SMART Check-in started. The page even swapped itself onto a stylesheet named end.css. An earlier version of the same notice had gone up in late May or early June without the 23:59 in it, and the time was added quietly afterwards.

The successor worked off a printed QR sticker on the table, read by an app. No reason for the shutdown appears in the notice or in the successor's press release, and there was no shutdown release of its own at all. What there is instead is the shape it left behind. A powered terminal in nine thousand restaurants, replaced by a piece of paper.

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