NYC restauranteur Danny Meyer looks to upend hospitality industry with Apple Watch
Famed New York City restauranteur Danny Meyer is outfitting floor managers and sommeliers at upscale eatery Union Square Cafe with Apple Watch hardware, a tech-meets-hospitality integration that could shape the future of restaurant services.
The forthcoming rollout was revealed on Wednesday at the TechTable Summit in New York, where Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group announced a partnership with digital reservation startup Resy, Eater reports.
When Union Square Cafe reopens in October after undergoing some ten months of renovations, key staff members will sport an Apple Watch loaded with the ResyOS app.
The platform, created to integrate reservations, mobile payments, point-of-sale and on-the-floor services, is programmed to communicate with a back-of-house system hosted by an iPad. With an Apple Watch strapped to their wrist, Union Square Cafe managers and sommeliers can be alerted to a variety of scenarios, from new seatings to orders to customer requests.
For example, a floor manager might receive a notification when a VIP enters the restaurant or a guest waits too long for their order, while a sommelier might be alerted when a bottle of wine is ordered, the report said. Every feature within ResyOS is designed to streamline operations, cutting out unnecessary steps where possible with real-time communication tools. In another example, managers can request a guest's coat be readied at the coat room once their meal is finished.
Maureen Cushing, co-founder of TechTable and USHG's VP of Technology, said ResyOS is "another way to listen and respond to our guests," likening certain app features to Uber feedback.
On the consumer side of the equation, ResyOS lets diners to pay with Resy Pay, a digital payments solution that allows users to split the check and pay with their smartphones. Other features are in the works that will allow customers to add people to a preexisting reservation or tell ResyOS that they're running late by simply texting an automated service.
Depending on its success, the Apple Watch project might make its way to other USHG restaurants.
The forthcoming rollout was revealed on Wednesday at the TechTable Summit in New York, where Meyer's Union Square Hospitality Group announced a partnership with digital reservation startup Resy, Eater reports.
When Union Square Cafe reopens in October after undergoing some ten months of renovations, key staff members will sport an Apple Watch loaded with the ResyOS app.
The platform, created to integrate reservations, mobile payments, point-of-sale and on-the-floor services, is programmed to communicate with a back-of-house system hosted by an iPad. With an Apple Watch strapped to their wrist, Union Square Cafe managers and sommeliers can be alerted to a variety of scenarios, from new seatings to orders to customer requests.
For example, a floor manager might receive a notification when a VIP enters the restaurant or a guest waits too long for their order, while a sommelier might be alerted when a bottle of wine is ordered, the report said. Every feature within ResyOS is designed to streamline operations, cutting out unnecessary steps where possible with real-time communication tools. In another example, managers can request a guest's coat be readied at the coat room once their meal is finished.
Maureen Cushing, co-founder of TechTable and USHG's VP of Technology, said ResyOS is "another way to listen and respond to our guests," likening certain app features to Uber feedback.
On the consumer side of the equation, ResyOS lets diners to pay with Resy Pay, a digital payments solution that allows users to split the check and pay with their smartphones. Other features are in the works that will allow customers to add people to a preexisting reservation or tell ResyOS that they're running late by simply texting an automated service.
Depending on its success, the Apple Watch project might make its way to other USHG restaurants.
Comments
This is hot!
Don't underestimate it!
Floor manager in a restaurant, pit boss in a casino...
But, any iOS device [AppleWatch, iPhone, iPad, AppleTV, new iDevice] can act as a server to other devices. It is no big deal to dedicate an iPad to continuously run a specific app and perform the duties of, say, a web server or back room server.
There are several Objective C iOS web servers available. But, I believe the real breakthrough will be an iOS web server written in Swift -- and will come from the Apple IBM partnership.
Below, is a sample of an open-source Swift web server that runs on a Mac (macOS) or IBM's Cloud (Linux). It has the capability to use 2,000+ services such as Watson -- even maimframe CICS (my old stomping ground).
It would be relatively simple for Apple/IBM to enable this web server to run on an iDevice. The A10 has more power than the typical web server of a few years ago... maybe that's what the rumored new Apple device is for (the one that's getting FCC approval).
Not to mention having staff walking about with walkie-talkies or headsets and boom mics just doesn't translate to an elegant, fine dining experience.
Not picking on you, but here's a web server running on an iPhone 6+.
Here's a Screen Snap from the iPhone:
And a browser accessing the web server running on the iPhone:
There were several other apps running (suspended) on the iPhone.
https://os.resy.com/?_escaped_fragment_=
In case you haven't noticed, in the past few iterations of iOS, Apple has opened more APIs to developers -- encouraging solutions like this!
I get that there's a stretch analogy for managing the resources in a restaurant, but regardless, using the 'OS' suffix in technology is commonly understood to mean a computer operating system (which, by definition, it's not).
And again, a web server is not an operating system. It's an application which relies on the underlying operating system to provide it the computing resources it needs to communicate with other machines using HTTP (access to networking hardware, memory to store network and state data, CPU time to execute, etc).
Well...
What is an operating system if not a specialized app to maximize the use of hardware resources.
What would you call a computer system that doesn't have an operating system?
The earliest computers I had access to was the IBM 650 and Burroughs B205 maimframes circa 1958 -- they had no operating systems. I got job at Lockheed in 1960 programming an IBM 1401 Card System... It had no operating system! Rather:
A modern server, such as the Swift Kitura Web Server handles most of the processing and I/O programmed within the server app. It does use APIs from the OS's SDK, but it assumes responsibility for starting/stopping threads/processes, communicating with services, accessing external resources, scheduling/queueing/handling requests and responses, etc. If little else is running on the hardware, the server app kind of assumes the role of an operating system -- but at a higher level of abstraction. This is especially emphasized when the hardware runs multiple server apps -- each in its own virtual machine -- maybe each specializing in one or more of: http serving; database access; file I/O; remote services access, etc.
One final thought: Apple considers Swift to be everything from an application programming language, a high-level System programming language to a low-level scripting language. It appears that IBM plans to replace all the disparate server-side stuff: web app server, app server, packaging, scripting, etc (all written in different languages - with different interfaces) with with equivalents written in Swift or not-needed because of the power of Swift.
For modern personal computer systems (desktop computers, laptops, phones, tablets, etc), it's more common to view the OS as a layer in an overall system, and applications as a layer which sit above the OS. But for special purpose systems like the embedded systems in cars, the OS very much is just an application (those layers are combined).
Unless the function that system is designed to perform is purely handled by the hardware components it's built from (e.g. driven solely by input to those components, or similar), I'd call it a bunch of computer components with no function.
So there is some embedded hardware control in your example: the load button triggers the system to accept the input from the cards. That input is read and either stored somewhere in memory or executed immediately (depends on how bootstrapping works). So again, there's some embedded logic to handle that process.
Once the program is booted, obviously it's sending commands directly to the hardware to perform operations. So you're right: it's acting like it's own operating system at that point (controling/managing hardware resources directly). It's an operating system specialized to the particular function your program is designed to provide.
Well, any fairly large application needs to establish it's own structure for use of system resources (where data is cached, how large the cache(s) can grow, how many threads/processes/concurrent operations to use, etc). So if you're going to use that as the definition of an OS, then most large applications would qualify an OS. Emulators are actually an interesting case where you have an application that's simulating the function of the hardware + OS of another computer system. But regardless, they're still applications.
By my definition, if a piece of software is subject to the structure of a lower-level hardware resource management system (e.g. it can't directly send instructions to the CPU and have them executed immediately, can't directly read/write to any valid memory address, etc) then it's an application, not an OS. Your earlier web server example is most certainly subject to the resource management done by the underlying OS.
Well, obviously Apple can do with Swift code what they like since they have full control over the operating system. So they could, in theory, create some structure whereby Swift code bypasses the OS APIs and kernel and directly controls the hardware. However, for everyone else using Swift, it's an application programming language until such time as Apple says otherwise (provides that structure to external developers). I can imagine that they might open up kext (kernel extension/system) development using Swift to external developers, but there's no way they'd open up direct access to their hardware (except for possibly to select developers they work closely with -- thinking of hardware component creators).