Idea Khan. A Mine of Startup Ideas

Grubia.com. What to eat?Where to eat?

August 23rd, 2008
Submitted By: Idea Khan

Posted in Miscellaneous |
Tags: eatout, food, menus, rate, restaurant, review

Grubia.com is a social way to discover and know what to eat and where to eat what you want to eat?

As a foodie, i have had some real information needs which translated into the idea for grubia.

Idea Date: Somewhere around Jan, 2008. After many hours of brainstorming with my co-founder, we nailed this down. We wanted to do something in the online food media space. But we wanted to solve a real need and also build something cool and different (read not another restaurant review site, food blog or recipe site).

Site URL: Grubia.com

Blog: http://grubia.blogspot.com

Motivation: Consider the following scenarios

1. Have you ever been in a situation where you have gone to a restaurant and looked at the menu and wondered, what to eat there? What is good? Perhaps, yes (specially if you go to eat food you are not very familiar with ). You may has asked the waiter/waitress and heard them say, “Oh, everything is awesome here!”. Wow, that surely helps.  So you know where to eat, but not what to eat?

2. Similarly, you may have had a burning desire to eat one of your favorite foods (hmmm, i just love the classic north indian dish, mutton biryani).

3. You just walked into some place to grab some food. And it turned out that the place has an awesome cheeseburger. You want to tell the world. “folks, you cant not miss the burger here.” You know where one should eat and what one should order but dont have a place that you can do exactly that.

Existing Solutions Landscape

1. Restaurant review sites - such as yelp.com, zagat.com However, these focus on restaurant reviews and not the review of the dishes being served.

2. Menu listing sites - such as menupages.com. Again, they provide what is available but not what is great at a place

3. Blogs - well they do everything but cant answer the specific question, what to eat at a particular place?

4. Recipe sites  - such as ifood.tv which provide recipes but that is not that helpful.

Innovation Factor:

1. Focusing on just the real stuff, food!

2. Crawlers that get the menu and restaurant data

3. Grub ranking algorithms that  use several parameters to rank the different dishes across the restaurants so that when you lookup a place, you know what are the three most recommended appetizers, drinks, entrees and desserts

Current Status (as of 08/01/2008):

1. In active development since may, 2008

2. Submitted for techcrunch 50.

3. Interviewed for tc 50.  Invite for the demopit

4. Site launched (alpha) on August 20, 2008.

Stay tuned! Will be posting many updates. The site  will be launching in private beta in a few days.

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Right Here. Right Now. The need for proximity based p2p matching

June 23rd, 2008
Submitted By: Idea Khan

Posted in Ideas |
Tags: mobile computing, Social Networks

Right Here. Right Now.

Consider the following scenarios.
1. You are riding the subway. You are getting bored and notice this gorgeous person sitting a few seats away from you. You are hesitant to start a conversation (ipod plugged in). Wudnt it be cool that you get a notice on your cellphone if the person matches your ideal date parameters.

2. You are a conference and are hoping to find some people interested in the area of mobile gaming. Wudnt it be cool that you can set a lookup request on a website/cellphone which would then send you a beep if a match was found within your proximity.

3. You are looking to buy a TV or sell a car. And it may happen that the person sitting next to you in a restaurant or bar is the one looking for that car you want to get rid off.

4. You want to hire the best web programmer and you are completely oblivious that the guy who you see at the local bookstore every sunday is a born hacker.

In our daily lives, we go on looking for someone or something, without realizing that sometimes they are right there, beside us. As they say, “first look in your backyard, before seeking out in the world.”

Gist: Right here, Right now is a technology solution that allow people to connect with one another based on common interests and physical proximity in a manner that doesnt violate the privacy of a user and one that is not overwhelming with irrelevant match notifications.

Differentiation: At this time i was thinking this, there seemed to be no real solutions out there. However, in recent years and with the launch of the 3-g iphone, such location based applications may already be in the pipeline.

Solution:

1. A website where a user creates a profile and specifies their cell phone number

2. Allows users to create several people lookup profiles. For example, create a profile for your ideal date, a profile for finding someone for a job, meeting someone for business, etc.

3. Track users location through the GPS coordinates in their phones. Or alternatively provide a bluetooth application that detects neighboring cellphones and beams the userids of the users to the server where a compatibility match is performed

4. If a match occurs (both users profiles match on atleast X% of criteria) ,then users get an alert to send a text for to initiate communication .

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