Quote:
Originally Posted by TableBeeps
I'll contribute an idea I have thought about.
Basically it would be a mobile application for food and drink vending at stadium events, football games, basketball games, concerts etc. I think this may have been implemented to some degree in newer stadiums so it might not be that original.
Essentially you would enter what section, row, seat your in, and place your order. The vendor closest to your section would see it and deliver the beer to you. You would also be able to pay for the item via the app include adding a tip. This would make it so you dont have to pass money and returned change back and forth through out the entire row. Think about how outdated of a process it is to pass money back and forth in a row. I personally get pissed off at a football game anytime I have to pass money back and forth, it takes my focus away from what i am watching.
I did some work a couple years ago with a "company" called eStadium that had a lot of similarities to this. It was originally developed as a student/professor project between Purdue/OSU/GaTech that did stuff like deliver game highlights to your phone while you're at the game, interactive games with other people at the games, real time stats, play-by-play info, and mobile food ordering.
Check out
http://estadium.gatech.edu on your phone for an example from the UGA/GT game. If you click the scoring plays it should launch a video highlight of that play.
Unfortunately I put company in quotes because really this was an academic project, and despite all the pushing from myself and a couple other MBAs we weren't able to get the guy to give up a little control of it and really try to run it as a business selling to other schools.
There's definitely a potential market for it though. No one has really flooded the market yet either, and there are plenty of applications you can expand this in to (concert venues, movie theaters, performing arts centers, etc.).
I think the big problem is also going to be making the partnerships with the vendors. It's usually one big company that runs the entire stadium (Sodexo does a lot around here) so you can't just go try to sell the pizza store manager, and the hot dog store manager, you have to go through a big company that is going to have a much longer and more complex sales cycle.