Flip creator gets into the grilled cheese business, Sequoia invests (venturebeat.com) |
Flip creator gets into the grilled cheese business, Sequoia invests (venturebeat.com) |
I mean, apart from anything else it's going to make 'em look especially silly if it fails. I can see the annual report now. "This year we made $50 billion from five IPOs in the computer-aided drug discovery, computational nanotech, and metamaterials sectors. We also wrote off $10 million we invested in a grilled cheese chain."
Quadcopter are very fast and can go very far before they lose power. And a single sandwich is not a very heavy load.
If you are outdoors and can give it your GPS coordinates, a single restaurant/quadcopter port, could serve a very large area.
e.g. sender logs a job online (& provides payment details), sender prints a barcode sticker, sender drops off package with the building doorman/concierge and/or walks to designated quadcopter landing zone adjacent building, outgoing package scanned and loaded onto quad-copter, quad-copter delivers package to recipient's landing zone, quad-copter/system sends notification to recipient to advise that package has been delivered, recipient goes to quad-copter landing zone to collect package, recipient scans barcode or provides electronic signature to acknowledge receipt.
Terms & Conditions: Anyone who implements this idea (or minor variation) must give hook and I a $1 royalty each for every job logged ;)
At this point, the FAA is _very_ serious about UAV safety, IMHO with good reason. Even with our extremely safe controls, we had one UAV crash due to launcher failure, and another get stuck up in the air a long distance away due to a sudden thunderstorm that rolled into our area.
http://www.starbucks.com/blog/introducing-starbucks-mobile-p...
When someone wants to eat, they pay immediately by mobile in a quick and easy way (hopefully), and hence lock themselves into not being able to change their minds, or going somewhere else, or not going anywhere but home.
see http://www.meltbarandgrilled.com
[1] I guess he called his "The Melt"
edit: first hit in Google for "The Melt" as well.
What do I win?
I'll name my shop "Panini Veri" (non quelle schifezze spacciate per panini italiani!)
http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/manhattan/he_making_gouda...
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/09/21/am...
He was covered quite a bit last year for taking orders via text message and for being mildly subversive of the NYC health department.
Ah well. I didn't have the contacts to pull it off, and it was only half an idea. :)
In fact, Orlando FL has quite a few food vans that occasionally all park in the same area for a mini food fair and attract a lot of people. They've become quite popular in the last year or 2. (I'm sure it happens other places, but Orlando is what I know.)
Grilled cheese and tomato soup van in the fall/winter.
Cupcake and Icee van in the spring/summer.
It's even got a main character, an interesting plot, and a twist ending!
I think there's an ad-hoc, informally specified set of standards for when a problem is "big enough" that people will pay to have it solved. What you're looking for is something within that range where you can out-executing the competition. Searching for "the biggest problem" oversatisfies the first half of that proposition at the expense of the second.
All that said, I find little inconvenience in the current fast food ordering process. Often there is a language barrier, but a combination of numbered meals and ambivalence towards picking off what I don't want solves that issue.
Possibly the restaurants could find value in making the experience "good enough" to keep me from going down the street and paying more at $fancy_restaurant where ordering is (relatively) hassle-free? I'm not convinced that can be done via phone in the lowest-common-denominator fashion of fast food.
On their end their software computes an estimated arrival time allowing them to precisely time cooking to be fresh and ready for you to eat when you arrive.
I would LOVE to see a Starbucks mobile app allowing me to do the same thing, so when I get to the store I could pick up my drink and walk out. In fact it would amaze me if Starbucks don't offer this in the next 18 months, given their recent steps into mobile applications (though, annoyingly for me, they test everything in the US first, so more like 3+ years until it will come to the UK).
It's called the Genghis Khan. Just go there and tell 'em I sent you.
edit: Actually I think the ideal would be two technical founders with complementary skills. One knows how to make a grilled cheese, and the other one knows how to drive.
Really? I just went down to Cheeseboard Pizza to get a slice, but the line was too long, so I went somewhere else. If I could have ordered and paid while I walked and then just picked it up when I got there, that would have been sweet.
Mind you, I'm pretty impatient.
There are some terrific sit-down restaurants that have tons of excess kitchen capacity.
a) They only make one type of pizza per day,
b) You stand in a line which always goes out the door in order to order it
c) Same line for eat-in or take-away.
They have a constant stream of pizzas coming out of the ovens and getting cut up. When you're standing in line all you're waiting for is for the guy at the front to find out how many slices everyone wants and to take their money.