India’s Zomato Expands into Print Restaurant Guides

As someone who has traveled around a bit, I really like any service or application which tries to catalogue points of interest in a city. India’s Zomato food and restaurant guide is one such service that has been doing well, with an informative website and mobile apps on all major smartphone platforms.

Today the company announced a somewhat surprising (but logical) move by announcing that it is expanding into print. It will publish the ‘Citibank Zomato Restaurant Guide 2012’ in four Indian cities: Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Pune. According to the announcement, there will be even more cities added next year. Zomato explains on its blog:

Over time, we want to be the brand which people look up when they need to decide where to eat. And we want to be platform agnostic. We know that there will always be a segment which will appreciate the paperback guide to good food around them.

The guides will be available in the second week of May, but if you’d like to pre-order, you can do so over on Flipkart. The price is Rs. 149 (or about $3).

Zomato also recently launched a Windows Phone app (see screenshots below), and says that so far there have been over 10,000 downloads. It’s impressive to see the service available on so many platforms, and now print as well.

It makes you wonder if we’re going to see a trend of digital content publishers expanding into print, as opposed to in recent years when tradition publishers, faced with the challenge of adapting to the new internet landscape, have been moving into digital. If new digital content companies come up with alternative business models to the traditional advertising model, it will be interesting to see if venturing into print becomes an appealing option for them.