Smart Lockers, Digital Dabbawala, and Distributed Commerce

[Eric Hunting]

I was thinking about automation and fast food today and this led me down
an interesting path of thought. We are now seeing a re-automation of the
front-end of fast food service as a consequence of the shift in the
physical nature of money, from coins to paper to debit cards to digital
money. Fast food started in the US with the Automat which highly
automated the front-end of service with a system of coin-operated
cabinets. It fell out of use because rising costs of food after WWII
made use of coin payment impractical. But the cumbersome nature of paper
money demanded a return to human service to handle it, compelling the
development of the counter service model now common to fast food. Now
the ubiquity of of debit card use and the emerging use of digital money
has facilitated a return to the automation of the fast-food front-end
through touch screen pre-ordering and, to a lesser but growing extent,
pre-order by web and smartphone. And I was thinking about how, since
much of this automation is dominated by custom-developed systems only
affordable to large chains, it could be useful to develop a more
general, turnkey, platform employing the touchscreens so many of us now
carry around in our pockets--smartphones--as the pre-order front-end for
smaller businesses that can't afford the kind of large installations
chains like McDonalds can.

This reminded me of the recently introduced San Francisco restaurant
called Eatsa (
http://insidescoopsf.sfgate.com/blog/2015/08/31/fast-food-reinvented-eatsa-a-fully-automated-restaurant-opens-today/
) and its reinvention of the Automat model through a combination of
touch-screen pre-order and digitally controlled lockers. I realized that
a combination of 'smart locker' or 'smart key' technology that
interfaced to smartphone apps offered a powerful combination
facilitating many new business and service models. A small independent
fast food restaurant relying on a take-away service model could greatly
reduce its operating overhead by employing an app and a set of smart
lockers as their front-end. The lockers wouldn't even need to be in the
same place as the restaurant, just convenient proximity. A restaurant
could have a collection of lockers about a city serviced cyclically and
customers could choose delivery locker points convenient to them. Or a
business could rely entirely on the smartphone front end for
delivery-only service, which would free the restaurant to operate with
no 'storefront' at all and thus seek very low-cost business locations.
This led me to realize the possibility of a digital dabbawala service--a
variation of the box lunch service common to India. A business could
have a set of smart lockers and workers would pre-order their lunches
on-line which would be delivered together in a single scheduled delivery
to the set of lockers at their worksite.

The more I think about it, the more novel business models I can imagine
with the concept of the smart lock or smart locker using apps to mediate
exchange. In the past we've considered the prospect of the smart lock as
a mechanism for managing the dispersed property of an on-line community
with common keys. We have already seen the example of 'dispersed
hotels'; hotels based on separate small rooms or apartments spread all
over a city. Originally relying on a central office and traditional
keys, they can now rely on a web site or app as a front end. You choose
rooms and pay for them on-line and are given a key code to open the
digital lock to the apartment wherever it may be. This model could be
extended to car rental and the sharing or renting of many kinds of
artifacts through common on-line front ends.

A smart locker can take many forms and be located in many places. Amazon
explored the idea of smart lockers located in the storefronts of big-box
office supply stores and mailbox shops--until the owners of those
companies clued-into the fact that they were being ripped-off. A set of
lockers of varying sizes can, employing a kind of digital Automat model,
serve as an Auto-Kiosk where items are stocked in display-locker cells
and purchased through the smartphone. Dispersed unused space in a city
can be rented as personal storage. Shipping services can be devised
based on mobile smart containers as the basis of an asynchronous
store-and-forward service. For instance, a set of containers may be
setup in a depot in a manner akin to traditional storage lockers, but be
removable for transfer by a regularly scheduled delivery truck. A
customer can place items in a container for shipping to their choice of
depot destinations where someone else with the same container key can
pick it up. This could also compliment a collaborative transportation
model where independent drivers transport containers asynchronously
between depots based on whatever spare capacity they have.

There seems to be a large unexplored field of possibilities in this
concept and it needs only a few simple elements; a flexible customizable
yet standard app for a front-end and a reliable smart lock.


--
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

Hi Eric,

I believe indeed we are heading this direction.

Now question is what strategy, and what thresholds for development.

For now, to finance software development for logistics,

I imagine using existing infrastructure and low cost investments, to then finance further solutions.

I believe also that the Internet Of Things, and low band technologies such as LoRaWAN, combined with, indeed, digital currencies and smartphones, open up many opportunities.

Uber is likely also expanding into the delivery business :

https://rush.uber.com/how-it-works

http://ubereats.com/eats/paris/

etc

And from there on, we can then generate a synthesis with temporary, potentially mobile, low cost local modular microfactories and processing / assembling "nodes" ( including for food ) ,

from which elements can converge and be dispatched.

The benefits can be further mass customization, including for food,

and a further inclusion of various "third spaces" in the local "production" and logistics spaces,

and/or even the inclusion of private "home" kitchens and spaces , for local dispatching based on last minute demand.

Cities could be rethoughts, with some currently vacant land, even if only temporary vacant land awaiting construction, can be used as logistical hotspots using such modular units.

--
Eric Hunting
erich...@gmail.com

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open+M" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to op-n-m+un...@googlegroups.com.
Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/op-n-m.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.