Monday, August 13, 2007

Check Please

[this idea is currently under development in a major technology institute. Copyright 2005]

Imagine a standard electronic interface to be added to tables in restaurants. this would have only a few buttons, with basic icons similar to the icon for the stewardess in the airplane. The icons would be: (1) Need waiter (2) Urgently need waiter (3) Need check. This way you avoid a situation where your waiter is standing over you and you arent ready to order, or, you are engaged in a conversation, and similarly, when you want the check, it just as well prints out from your table (with the below extension)

Here is the spec I set up for our MBA team:

The problem: A waiter, poking his/her head around, looking anxiously to see if his customers have enough bread, and water, and if they are ready to order, or still conversing, or are ready to leave.

The solution: A merging of refurbished hardware and technological ingenuity geared for an efficiency promoting solution.

Refurb Palm Pilots are programmed to use their IR ports, which carry beams a distance of approx 30 feet, to a receiver. The palm pilots have a basic drawn map of the restaurant (tables and setting). The patron can press one of 3 basic button symbols on a controller on the side of the table, thinner and less than the size of a credit card.

Once the patron is ready to order he can click a button for such cause. Once ready to leave, or if they need to call upon their waiter to visit them for any reason, he should do so upon seeing their symbol light up.

Implications for other types of IR communication, as well as digitizing the written-out-check process are discussed in phase 2

A variety of possible applications ranging from airline style stewardess controls, to napkin holders embedded with a more powerful IR beamer are under development

Further implications of replacing the older demeaning ‘bell’, are a mood light which hangs slightly over the table with certain detections of anxiousness.

The overall purpose of this project is to increase productivity of a waiter- per-table and the connotations that can have on electronic dining of the future

Project Checkout Deliverables:
An actual marketable product based on appropriate research, data communication, technology applications, wireless applications, XML code.

2 comments:

EntrepreneurNI said...

cool idea!!

Anonymous said...

Spotted in Brazil:
http://i47.tinypic.com/28hpqbn.jpg