My startup idea

nimnomnimy on 21/09/2016 - 22:50

Here is my idea, feel free to steal it or just comment.

I would setup a cloud company that signs up restaurants, venues, hospitality etc..

The company would get virtual email accounts assigned for each seat, table or whatever they sell.

Then anyone with outlook or similar could connect to my cloud network, setup a meeting or appointment and be able to see the availability and book.

If available (which it should be as you would be able to check in schedule manager) you would get an instant confirmation.

This would make it easy to co-ordinate functions, business meetings or even just lunch/dinner with 1 or more people.

Essentially for anyone who works for a big corporate, it would work the same as booking a meeting room.

I can think of a dozen additional functions but the core concept would be having a huge network of hospitality and corporate locations, available easily and managed as an add on to outlook or similar.

No more open table, no more Dimmi. You could see who is attending, you could move the booking, you could even add a WebEx to the event for people to dial in.

General Discussion

Comments

  • Sage on 22/09/2016 - 03:53

    so like menulog for bookings.

  • tonyjzx on 22/09/2016 - 05:51
    +1

    You're better off having a look at how the bigger restaurants book as it is. They have their own software. They wont want to reinvent the wheel.

  • scotty on 22/09/2016 - 07:19
    +1

    Why Outlook, a piece of software that so many people try hard to escape from? I am still having nightmares from the corporate days…

    • [Deactivated] on 22/09/2016 - 08:31

      I agree. Eudora is still doing what it is supposed to do, why settle for anything less :)

  • the-mal on 22/09/2016 - 07:53

    Dimmi and other similar booking services already have developer APIs that make this possible (eg send an api request, have it accepted or denied). I'm not sure if they're public yet but I've paid for data from one of them previously so I know they exist.

    The architecture you describe sounds very cumbersome when a webservice would do the same thing, be way lighter weight and wouldn't require things like the allocation of email addresses or proprietary services like Outlook.

    You're basically describing the backend of the services that already exist without the convenience of their frontends (which is also how they gain some revenue by allowing restaurant/cuisine search and recommendations).

    Sorry to be a killjoy!

    • overlook on 22/09/2016 - 07:59
      +2

      ^ at least now he knows not to waste time and effort.

  • nimnomnimy on 22/09/2016 - 17:21

    I think of it more as the simplicity of integration.
    Built into the applications we already use.

    I think there is probably a niche market and more catered to corporate and executives and their PAs

    I'm probably not explaining it well, anyway I'm not going to pursue it. Hopefully Microsoft will pick it up :)

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