Sydney restaurant replaces menus with iPads

I got an email from my brother, Helmer, living in Sydney. The iPad is moving into areas that are close to the ideas of the “Future Store”.

THE iPad is already a tasty product among gadget lovers, but a North Sydney restaurant has become the first in Australia to replace their printed menus with Apple's new touch screen device, writes Stephen Fenech.

Global Mundo Tapas in the North Sydney Rydges Hotel yesterday [The Daily Telegraph, June 03, 2010 10:43AM] introduced a custom-made iPad application which allows customers to browse the virtual pages of the menu with a sweep of their finger.

Diners can peruse the dishes and see a picture of what the dish looks like along with tasting notes before compiling their order and sending it wirelessly to the kitchen.

The iPad menu can also suggest the best wines to go with certain dishes and suggest the best food pairings.

When ordering steak, users can even specify how they'd like the meat cooked and which sauce they'd prefer.

It will even ask them if they'd like fries with that.

Mundo's iPad menu app can also help keep track of stock levels so if certain dishes and wines sell out they will automatically disappear off the on-screen menu.

Craig Simpson, Rydges area general manager, says the new iPad platform will enhance the dining experience.

"We have something that presents really well, sells our food really well and is absolutely dynamic," he said.

Mr Simpson said the iPad menu would eventually make it possible to order food based on the weather or even match dishes to a person's mood.

While the waiters and waitresses of the restaurant will still be required to take the food from the kitchen to the tables, the iPad will mean they =ill have to work a little harder for their tips.

Credit to: 

By Stephen Fenech

From: The Daily Telegraph

June 03, 2010 10:43AM

What comes after Social Media?

SILICON VALLEY – Year 2003 things were heating up again in the valley after the dot com crisis and 2001 WTC twin tower catastrophe.

Web 2.0 and social media made Internet services fashionable again, pulling back entrepreneurs who thrived or merely survived in the first rounds of activities on the Internet that began two decades ago.

New companies emerged from nowhere. Blogs became popular. We got wiki and microblogs. Flickr, YouTube, MySpace, Skype and a myriad of other social media services emerged.

Google and Apple are now the most glowing examples of post-dot-com-crisis. Both companies have positioned themselves for future growth. But they are also becoming competitors.

Millions of people around the world learned to use Facebook and Twitter. Nokia is still the world’s biggest mobile phones producer and supplier but it’s not the leader in usability. Google launched Buzz this year.

It’s interesting to see how fast the competitors are countering the successful launching of iPad. Nobody has been able to deliver a iPhone killer? Is it going to take three to five years before we see the first iPad killers as well?

Fish and Chips, iPad and electronic paper

iPad was released last week and will come to your local store in USA after two months.

I’ve no idea about the release in Finland.

iPad promises a number of things for content suppliers.

Helsingin Sanomat will be able to charge for the content delivered to the iPad but probably not for content streamed to an average computer.

It’s a perfect tool for many applications.