Zomato, the online restaurant and nightlife guide, which entered the Middle East, last month with its UAE launch, has now expanded its services to Sri Lanka. After Dubai, Abu Dhabi and Sharjah, Colombo (zomato.com/colombo) is Zomato's fourth International city taking its presence to 17 cities across 3 countries - India, UAE and Sri Lanka. Zomato will offer information including, scanned menus, photos and coordinates, on around 600 restaurants across Colombo. According to Zomato, the Colombo launch is in line with Zomato’s plans to further increase its reach in the Middle East and South East Asia by the end of 2012. A three people team will take care of the Colombo operations. Interestingly, barring travel sites like Tripadvisor and Lonely Planet, there are no dedicated online restaurant guides in Sri Lanka. On how Zomato selects potential markets: Deepinder Goyal, Founder and CEO Zomato said, "Along with some macro level indicators, we do on-ground research across several metrics (data collection, merchant partnerships, user engagement etc) before entering a new market. He added that Colombo had fit in into the expansion plans as it required limited product customisation for the local market allowing it to replicate its model seamlessly. Pulled out of Singapore: Zomato decided to pull out of Singapore, even though it had collected a lot of data, as restaurants were not willing to share menus, and it was taking a lot of time to collect data compared to other markets, he stated. He also added that consumer behaviour research indicated that Singaporeans were less likely…
