A life changing discovery? No. Pointless? Maybe. A way to tell people about things you are involved with and think are great? Definitely.

Well at iTakeout we don’t like to be left out in the cold when there is pointless mouse-clicking to be done. You may have noticed that we have introduced some ‘Like’ buttons directly onto the iTakeout site. No longer do you need to order your favourite takeout and then write something like ‘just ordered from iTakeout’ manually on your profile. You can simply click the button and all your friends will know that you ‘like’ us – and we hope they will like us too.

On your preferences page (click your name in the top-right when you are logged in) you can tell your friends that you like iTakeout. Go on, be nice and give it a click!

More usefully, on each restaurant page, under your order on the right you can tell everyone that you recommend that particular restaurant. So if you enjoy a restaurants food or have just had a good meal, take the plunge and recommend them to your friends.

Will you enjoy using these new features as much as you meal itself? We hope not – but it’s a bit of fun. So get clicking!

All you have to do it get yourself over to our Facebook page, become a fan (or “like” as they like to call it now) and then tell all of your friends about it.  Simple.

So click “suggest to friends” at the top of our page and invite your friends to “like” itakeout.co.uk For every friend you invite you will get an entry into our prize draw for the £10 voucher. So, if you invite 50 friends you get 50 entries, but if you invite 500 friends you get 500 entries!

Full details can be found on the page itself.

The draw will be made 1 week from today at 1700 on Thursday 27th May. Just in time for the bank holiday.

So why not enter today and look forward to enjoying your next Curry, Chinese, or Pizza take away on us.

Good luck!

Advertising space is currently up for grabs and if you are interested in placing an ad, please contact us directly.

For our avid fans you can have a sneak peak at what it sounds like by clicking here.

Are we mad? Well – probably. But we really believe that once people have used iTakeout.co.uk once they will want to come back and use it again. It is the the most convenient and fun way of ordering takeaway food!

So how do you do it? Well if you are signed up to receive updates from us then you will have already received your referral code in the (e)mail. Simply pass on that code to any of your friends and get them to type it into the discount code box at the end of their order. Not only will they get £1 of their order – but it will earn you £1 off your next order!

If you are not signed up but want to tell your friends then simply visit the website, enter your friends email address on this page and we’ll email them for you. If they order and enter that code, they get £1 off their order and you get £1 off your next! Everyone wins! There is no limit to the number of friends you can refer (so if you refer 20 and they all order – well, your next curry is free…).

Referral discounts can only be used by new customers and codes must be entered at the time of the order. Full terms and conditions are available on the website.

We’ve recently had a few questions about card payments on the site and so thought it was a good idea to make the information available to all.

Here are the questions:

Why can’t I use my card on all restaurants?

Some of our partner restaurants opt to only receive payment for orders in cash. This is an option that we make available to them – if you would like to use your card with your favourite restaurant and they currently don’t accept it, let us know and we’ll let them know!

My card was refused saying the transaction was declined. Why?

Good question – there could be any number of reasons:

• Your bank declined the card perhaps because of insufficient funds or some other reason.
• Your billing address did not match the address your bank holds. We will only accept cards whose addresses match – so make sure that is typed correctly.
• Other information such as your security code or issue number wasn’t entered correctly.

Do you accept all kinds of credit cards?

We accept most kinds of credit cards:

• Visa
• Mastercard
• Switch
• Solo
• Some Maestro cards

We currently cannot accept Maestro cards with 18-digit long card numbers or Maestro cards without an issue number or start date. These are normally issued by HSBC and some scottish banks. We hope to support these cards in the future.

So there we go! If you have any further questions, don’t hesitate to get in touch…

2008 saw much in the way of bleak business news: struggling banks, a tumbling world economy, dwindling house prices and many much loved businesses facing the chop. 2008 was also the year in which iTakeout hit the streets of Portsmouth! Back in September 2008 we launched with just a couple of restaurants and the hope that someone would order something from them! While we are really pleased with how the site has grown in terms of the number of users and visitors we are looking to really ramp that up in 2009. We will also be expanding the number of restaurants that you can order from as well as the areas that they will deliver to.

We will keep you posted on the blog with all the latest iTakeout news. Please feel free to drop us a line with any comments or queries by contacting us or replying to this blog post below.

So iTakeout.co.uk is due to go live in the next day or so! Even though we have been working on this for over nine months there is still going to be something very cool about having food delivered to your door without saying a word or lifting a butt cheek. Fantastic.

We’ll be using this blog to keep you up-to-date on the latest happenings in the world of iTakeout. You can subscribe to our RSS feed to ensure you never miss anything or you can simply pay us a visit every so often. Please feel free to leave us comments and feedback. We want to do everything we can to ensure your iTakeout experience is as smooth as possible.

Thanks and happy eating,
The iTakeout.co.uk Team