Project foodNOW

foodNOW is an idea born out of my love for food and technology.  It is a mobile phone application idea that allows people to enter a restaurant that they enjoy and then foodNOW would respond by outputting restaurant suggestions that are similar. Users would also be able to provide feedback on approval or disapproval of restaurant suggestions, which the foodNOW application would then take into account for future selections. foodNOW is predictive and interactive.

Let’s take New York City as an example, even though this mobile phone application could be applied to any city. Imagine going to your favorite restaurant only to find that there is an hour wait. What are you to do now that you aren’t in front of your computer and don’t have Menupages or Citysearch at your finger tips? The answer is foodNOW.

Let’s say the restaurant that you are trying to go to is Coffee Shop in Union Sq so you type this into foodNOW. It will quickly scan its entire database of restaurants to find a restaurant with similarities to your choice. Taking into consideration proximity to your current location, foodNOW returns Cafeteria and outputs the restaurant’s address, opening hours, telephone number and website information. foodNOW understands that if you like Coffee Shop you will most likely enjoy Cafeteria (which is just around the corner). You now instantaneously have the information to call Cafeteria and make a reservation or most likely, find out how long the wait is there. If the restaurant is not quite right you can tell it so next time its predictions will get better for you.

Storyboard pictures of the PowerPoint presentation are below:

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www.wolframalpha.com

Jane came across a very interesting website today. Wolfram|Alpha's long-term goal is to make all systematic knowledge immediately computable and accessible to everyone. So if I type in my name, Michelle, the website returns some statistics surrounding my name. Apparently, the most common age for my name, Michelle, is 41. This is an interesting attempt towards universal knowledge sharing. Let's see how this type of site compares to hunch.com or facebook's questions feature.

OpenTable Mobile App

Seems like OpenTable has a heavily used mobile phone app. 5 million diners were seated via a mobile phone app. Here we have another good example of technology improving everyday life!

Read the press release on OpenTable's website.