Luís Martinho presentation on Á Lá Carte @ BarcampPT 2010

1. finding the food you want, Colony style
Luís Martinho
June 2010

2. Finding restaurants
The problem
we get easily
. Always eating in the same place bored
. No knowledge about neighboring restaurants
. No knowledge about prices not willing to
spend more than
. No knowledge about restaurant styles
8 eur
. No knowledge about restaurant menus
we love italian

3. Finding restaurants
The current solutions
. Google
. Google maps
. yelp.com
. Other things like:
try searching for food
usdiner.com
instead of restaurant name
restaurants.com
zagat.com
. Traditional restaurant guide books
if you have
plenty of time to kill

4. The fails...

5. not really a
restaurant
good shot!
but a bit
expensive

6. Great! no results...
Coimbra?
yet another
recipe!

7. Great! no results again...
But we forgive you!

8. *
penne all arrabiata in coimbra for 8 euro Search
The new way to discover a place to eat
*

9. À La Carte
Usage
Restaurant
Vs
. Restaurant comparison
Restaurant
. City restaurant tour
. Business intelligence backed clustering
recommendation engine
based on your
. Healthy food recommendations history
. Random restaurant selection
. Restaurant and dish comment
and reviewing system feeling lycky?

10. À La Carte
The stakeholders
The restaurant owner
. Publishes information about his restaurant
. Updates daily menu feed
. Publishes chef's and other recommendations
The end user
. Finds a place to eat
. Reviews the place he visited
. Updates the geographic information for that place

11. À La Carte
The ecosystem
5
1
Restaurant owner 4 The user finds the
publishes information restaurant, the
2 3 food and rates it
or even complements
the info!
The system processes
and publishes the information

12. À La Carte
Basics
Search engine
+
Database
. Semantic based . Lots of restaurant information
. Human proof . Structured
. Just works . Open
Everything else is built on top of these simple concepts

13. À La Carte
The brain
1. The query:
random francesinha in porto
3. Semantic parse
dish : francesinha
location: porto
random : true
4. The results
Restaurants, prices and reviews

14. À La Carte
Where it fits
Plugin Manager
REST Manager
Main Plugin
Web MVC Plugin
Web MVC app plugins

15. À La Carte
Web MVC
Entity
Manager
Template
Engine
Manager
Web MVC Plugin
Web MVC
Utils Plugin

16. À La Carte
Future Extensions
Authentication plugins Geolocation plugins

17. À La Carte
The business model
. Fremium based:
Free basic services and paid premium services
. Free profile creation and menu streaming
. Paid statistics and business intelligence about audience
. Paid booking
. Paid advertising
Contextual
recommendations
The restaurants pay the bill

18. À La Carte
The future
. Social experience
. Legacy system integration
. Loyalty driven system
. Restaurant tops, benchmarking.
More ideas to come !

19. Q&A
“there is no such thing
as a dumb question”
Luís Martinho
lmartinho@hive.pt