Week 4 - Issues Troubleshooting (Input/Output)

On my first blog post, introducing the FoodOn app in its makings, I received a comment that opened up some really interesting questions that I didn’t even realize. The comment was:
    “Would customers pay for the food and the service up front or when they got there? You might want to have the customer put down some sort of deposit otherwise the restaurants might be scared that the customer might not show up. It would definitely be useful if a person was in a rush. You could integrate the app with other systems out there like Yelp and open table to bring in customer reviews of different locations so that customers can more easily choose the best place for the meal.”
    So this comment brings in several topics of interest:
1. Pay system
2. Customer review site integration
    I have some possible answers to these questions that were brought up. For the pay system, it is reasonable to wonder how a restaurant would react to a customer that reserved and didn’t show up. After all, food prepared and wasted would be a disaster to the restaurant. Therefore, a credit card integration option would be offered however, for cash only transactions, there should be a warning system. If you order food and don’t pick it up, the restaurant will mark you and you will have one strike left. If you order form the restaurant twice and not go in the restaurant, you will be banned by phone number to use FoodOn for that restaurant. However, to make unforeseeable circumstances an option, there will be an option to cancel up to 20 minutes give or take depending on the restaurant your order.
    Also, I believe the customer review site integration system could be extremely well implemented because the review is already uploaded into another system. It would be very useful to our databases if we merged data.
    Last week’s lecture was input/output and this is extremely applicable to my idea because my idea represents the pinnacle of input and output technology. Technology already implemented by Google such as GOOG-411 and Google Voice can be well integrated into the FoodOn app so that people could simply tell their smart phones what they feel like eating. Then from there on, the app would search and tell them the possible choice they could be eating without them even having to look at their phone. This would be very useful for people who are already driving who cannot use their phone as they drive. Google Wallet NFC (Near-Field Communication) technology can also be implemented, because the cost of the meal would already be uploaded to the phone and all the customer would have to do is simply swipe their phone on their way out of the restaurant and they would be good to go.