News of an “Apple patent for wireless ordering”:http://mashable.com/2007/12/27/apple-starbucks/ has spread rather quickly. The gist of this patent is that Apple will allow iPhones and the iPod Touch to connect to a brick-and-mortar retail location for pre-advanced ordering of an item. The idea isn’t new by any stretch of the imagination and frankly Apple tends to patent just about every idea that they can possibly drum-up.
The rub in the initial reports was that they hypothetically positioned the experience at a major coffee retailer whom they’ve already got a digital experience with. [who could that be? -ed] Now, those initial reports were all well and fine when you consider that its just a few name drops as to the overall possibilities of a technology architecture such as this, but what was lacking was the basic facts: its just an simple idea. The above report carried the possibility a little bit too far. Laying next to this rather forwarding thinking idea is the hardened fact that a Point of Service system (the cash register) is an extremely locked down network making implementing such an idea for suggested retailers a networking nightmare. How Apple solves for this is the true genius but still, admittedly, a little bit unknown.
The trick, if Apple were to do something more with this idea, is to allow for network agnostic ordering to take place that allows a POS to allow orders to fall directly into the queue in a seamless manner. I wouldn’t tie this “web ordering” to a POS or any pre-existing digital infrastructure in a store but perhaps use bluetooth, bonjour, or something akin to
a) notify you if you’re within a networked range
b) allow for the user to select a pre-defined set of functionality based on this service location
c) user interaction would broadcast to a management system in store \ over the web?
d) somehow get the front of house or POS system to recognize that there is a new order in the cue.
Starbucks and Apple did something quite original in the Wi-Fi Music Store at Starbucks in that you’ve got digital goods available instantly at a physical location. Within the purely digital realm, handling and managing of data is a breeze. Bringing the digital to the physical, however, is much more complicated.
In the end, I think we’ve got a blueprint for the future: a store that has digital features but is still a face-to-face customer interaction location. Despite my overall depression when speaking with most people, despite a service agent constantly smiling and trying to make the experience a delightful one, you cannot remove this relationship from any physical store. People demand face-to-face customer interaction. “They always will”:http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/752-personal-attention-drives-apple-store-success.