1. My former co-worker Ajay raved about SeamlessWeb a few months ago. I finally tried it today – it’s great. It’s a restaurant site that automatically integrates with restaurant’s ordering system. All I had to do was pick a restaurant, click on the dish I wanted (General Tsao’s Chicken). Since it was a lunch special, it allowed me to choose white or brown rice, and a choice of soup. I paid with my credit card, including the tip, and 20 minutes later the food was here. This is the type of interface and simplicity that more and more online services are creating. They find something that’s valuable to people, and make it insanely easy and convenient.
2. Another one is the Flock Browser. I just found out about it recently and installed it. Within about 5 minutes I had integrated it to my WordPress blog (I am writing this post through Flock’s built in blog editor), looking at status of my friends in Facebook, and browsing through Flicker photos. Seamless experience again – a browser that’s very well integrated and designed for humans as social beings. Love it. Really makes me think of possibilities.
3. Yesterday I learned out about a tool for Mac called QuickSilver. It’s a software that makes it very easy to search and open programs. I found a few ones that are similar at lifehacker. If finally settled on a program called KeyBreeze. So far I love it. It allows launching programs with a few keystrokes, has stick-it notes, allows to search the web or wikipedia or movies with a few keystrokes as well. Nice and simple and extremely powerful. I no longer have to look through a huge list of installed programs just to find the one I am looking for. Windows Vista has search-based start menu as well, but this is even more convenient. For example, to start MS Word, I press the hotkey ‘;’ anywhere I happen to be, then type ‘wo’ and the top application is Word. Press ENTER – word is launched.
A good problem for us enterprise software developers to have is that people will get used to this seamless experience. Forrester called this recently “Technical Populism” – people demanding the same seamless experience with their software at work as they do in the web. I am excited to be part of the people bringing that to the enterprise.
Blogged with Flock
Tags: web2.0, enterprise 2.0, simplicity
February 5, 2008 at 2:18 am |
[...] Seamlessweb – ordering food as simple as possible. [...]