You could also have web cams and watch people enjoying the food, licking their lips and giving a thumbs up to the viewers at home.
For an additonal fee, you could press a button a provoke a full scale food fight or view the highlights of previous culinary conflicts.

I kinda sorta see where you are going with this and I think your idea has a lot of potential.

whenever I order food at work and my co-workers are peering over. If they see a menu/website with nice images...even if they arent that hungry they end up ordering 20$ worth of food. [a]

what you are proposing, make's it a single click process where you can choose food, not from one location, but any location in and around your vicinity

[a]
I order from this restaurant at least once a week. Their online menu is a major factor why I order from this restaurant. A picture like they say is worth a million bucks.

http://www.phobentha...m/waterloo/menu.html

great idea!
6 rating

This is actually pretty cool!

Yeh I like the fact that the food is just being displayed and you choose when something looks good. Often I don't know exactly what I want to eat but then I see it and I just know I got to eat it.

Not that familiar with the technology but I wonder whether this could be done via some RSS feed?

I think that its a great idea and drh is right in that it can be done via RSS feeds (RSS2.0 incorporates pictures as well as text / links).

This coupled with the free availability of RSS viewers such as google desktop and snarfer means that you have an easy delivery tool. However, due to this it might be difficult to differentiate such a product.

On the other hand, your average restaurant owner probably has no idea about RSS feeds and therefore you could easily make a website a central repository for this type of information (with a chargeable fee).

I like it!

Yup! You could expand this to cell phones. For example people may be in dire need of a desert so the choose "Deserts" from the site mobile web page. Cheesecake Factory would probably jump on this idea.

Thanks for the great ideas. Definitely agree with you drh and WittZi, one of the nice things about this idea is the ability to plug into existing infrastructure. RSS would definitely be the way to go for displaying the food items, and many restaurants already have online ordering systems set up - we'd just have to plug into them.

The real differentiator with this idea is the fact that it recognizes that food is basically an impulse buy, similar to the candy bars, batteries, and dental floss that lines the checkout counter at the grocery store. Right now online food ordering is in the back of the store with the milk and eggs - time to put it in it's rightful place next to US Weekly. :)

Coda: dig the cell phone idea! Hadn't thought of that, would be sweet to hit a button on my cell phone during my commute and have a piece of cheesecake waiting on my doorstep when I got home.

My first tournament! Woot. Thanks for the great comments and votes everyone.

All I can say, Kevin is EAT ME! ;)

Hey, remember those of us who commented originally on your site when you first posted this idea. Those who still have their Kozmo bottle openers.

Hey what happened to the Twitterian idea? I really think that one has some great traction potential. Another tournament, I suppose.

Hey JDK, just bought a house this week so I'm CRAZY busy!! I did do a few Twitterian updates this morning as per your suggestions (no dups, 1024) and should get around to posting as a project in the next week or two. Ha, and dug the Kozmo joke - you seriously have a bottle opener? That rocks!

Kevin, I told all of my friends about this and they all thought it was great! I mean, instead of using the phone to order and having to go through the phone book for every kind of food you like, it's all on one website and one click and you're done, i looove this idea!

this is a very interesting idea- you're right that food is a total impulse buy. In our office when we set out to lunch we're always completely indecisive until one of us gets a strong image of a plate of thai food or a chicken salad or somethign... point being that it's the image of the food that always seals it.
oddly enough this is like the synthesis of two ideas i proposed awhile back:
Seal the Meal-> http://www.cambrianh...er/ideas-id/MY5zORY/
BurritoMe-> http://www.cambrianh...er/ideas-id/3w74UAy/

there's a company in AZ called "Delicious Deliveries" that locked up deals with many of the restaurants in town to do their menus and handle delivery for them- doing deals with companies like those that already own the relationship would be key.

Great Idea!

Keep going!

It needs to work on cell phones, baseds on GPS position.
Tommy

how has this idea evolved since the Friendly Giant Tournament?

There goes the diet, sigh. Cool idea.

I like it... would need at lot of logistics..but doable.

]V[oogy

Check out http://www.miniaturecube.com/

It does a neat job of deciding what to eat for you - might be some ideas there...

I like it because I enjoy going to restaurants and asking the waitress to bring me their favorite, or picking a chef's-combo-of-the-day... I'm not too picky and like to try different foods. So a site like this would bode well for adventurous eaters, as the customer isn't able to specify "I'd like THAT but... I'm vegan... can you make the steak without any meat?"

I do want this one on my mobile

You could have a menu widget. Click on your choices and they deliver it to you.
Would be great to build up local custom for all sorts of outlets.
The business would be providing the widgets?

Why just the food. It could be any service industry. I like it a lot.
You could have main dealer garages showing spare appointments. Anything