I’ve been thinking back on the recent Southwest Foodservice Expo, reflecting on the technological advances available to the industry. Which are real and which are ephemeral? Technology marches on. Who needs a buzzer to tell you table is ready when a restaurant can text you?
I had started to think about this during the show. Steven R Thompson captured it in his Dallas Business Journal piece, Optimism on Display at Food-Service Expo.
The manager’s log book now has online applications in the cloud. The demo site I saw from CommLog had a lot of red on it, but I am not sure if it was connected to the famous “red book.”
Another booth featured a group who will manage your social media for you from afar, you never have to come up with an original tweet again. Seems like there are a plethora of people who are setting up shop to do one thing or another along these lines. I met one familiar face who is doing the same thing. I had never met him before, but apparently we are LinkedIn.
Yet another booth featured an online comment card system that linked to social media. The good things your fans are saying about you on comment cards automatically show up where they have online influence. I asked them to send me some information, though I haven’t seen it yet. I’m curious to know what happens to the message when a guest doesn’t leave an email address. I didn’t really need an email coming back to me about my dry rice in one of their client restaurants, just wanted to let management know.
And I met Ian Jarett, founder of dangilovethat, who deserves points just for his company name. Dang… is an online comment card that is driven from a QR code through a smart phone and feeds back your comments by server name. Wow! I did it at Howard Wang’s Uptown China Brasserie and it was cool in a QR-technology-is-still-fun sort of way.
It will be interesting to see which of these are going to be ubiquitous and which will be forgotten. Feel free to share your thoughts about which are the breakthroughs and which are the also-rans.