
Ask HN:Need comments & 2 hackers 4 virtual assit./concierge w/LBS game concept - saychef
Thanks for your thoughts!  -  Comments, critiques and conversations would be greatly appreciated.  
Also looking for two wickedly smart hackers to help co-found and apply to YC10.<p>Concept Idea:     Help people eat better, socialize more efficiently, spend less, do more and enjoy life extensively<p>SayChef!  (what would you do.?..  what do you have to say?..   this is what I say!..    what do my friends say?..  )  ChefPoints and ChefRewards based on system activity.   Put a market maker in food via your own virtual personal assistant and concierge. A new interface at the intersection between mobile, local, and urban life.  This world is a game; play it.<p>Think....   the personal assistant space including Siri, Aloqa and Geodelic's Sherpa combined with the LBS game mentality space of Foursquare and Gowalla.<p>There is a reason each above mentioned (&#38; recently funded or launched) start up always mentions food and restaurants along with accompanying entertainment or shopping based activities in their descriptions. Its the most localized, high impact spot in the market.  According to comScore, advertisements for restaurants and food boast the highest response rates of all SMS advertising.  Monetize the credibility.<p>SayChef!...   Enhanced with technologies to improve the user experience such as speech recognition, natural language processing, semantic data processing, and geo-location to create a virtual assistant/concierge that helps you perform tasks through a simple conversational, question-and-answer interface.  It already is a branded interface-- use it.  Create conversations-- earn free food.<p>Make the Internet (especially the mobile version) a far simpler tool to help you get things done.  Processing intent on what someone is trying to do, where they are, who they are.... and then helping them do it.  Make it easy to communicate through speech recognition, intent understanding, and a simple conversational interface.<p>A personalized shopping assistant in food  &#38; entertainment purchasing that understands specialized needs, gps locations, digital coupons and feedback channels, creating a game mentality in food &#38; entertainment recommendation and purchasing-- segueing into shopping and travel.  Combining the network effects of semantic social marketing, with personalized choices in food purchasing could in effect create a trusted curator of the kitchen, in the cloud.<p>What would you say if you could talk to your computer?  How would you want it to respond back?<p>Action:  Talk to your friend:<p><pre><code>  SayChef?.....  (what would you do?  this is what I say!  what do my friends say?  what is everyone else doing? )             saychef.com      twitter.com/saychef       facebook.com/saychef
</code></pre>
Reaction:  ChefPoints and ChefRewards for certain actions:<p>ChefPoints.....  to certain deals and conversations.            chefpoints.com     twitter.com/chefpts       facebook.com/chefpoints<p>ChefRewards....  based on system based activity on points earned.        chefrewards.com   twitter.com/chefrewards     facebook.com/chefrewards<p>FoodPoints....   a management system for food.                foodpoints.com
ChefCard....   a digital wallet.                         chefcard.com
ChefPlan....   financial budgeting tool for professional and recreational chefs regarding food and entertainment spending.   chefplan.com
MyFoodChef....  personalized chef  for eating needs, geographic, demographic &#38; socially specific.    myfoodchef.com<p>If you had a personal shopping assistant in daily living, who knew everything.... wouldn't that be cool and make life a bit more fun?  Not an askjeeves.  But close proximity; more like a Rosie from Jetsons.  Jeeves was a butler, your personalized Chef is a friend.  Chef is an interactive presence who knows all of the 'kitchen in the cloud', inside the house and out.  Knows all appropriate activities before and after an eating occasion, knows and aggregates your likes, dislikes, and hobbies- according to importance and relevancy.  Chef knows the deals at the grocery store, local restaurants, food buzz, entertainment sensations and relevant shopping necessities that occur between meal times.   Pay with your mobile phone or card, creating a digital wallet.... earn points, create conversations, and make the rewards sensational.<p>Adding a customizable avatar to visually represent Chef and allow users to personalize their own chefs with the avatar animations text to voice, would make a rich personalized experience.  Voice recog, natural language search and query results are one aspect of the conversation.  Functionally adding  events to a calendar, to do lists,  making status updates for you,  jotting down notes- adds depth to the relationship.  Add a data mesh with localized fetches from multiple sources adding social graph data as in twitter/facebook tweets/posts from your top friends that are relevant to the query, as well as reviews, suggestions and personalized recommendations.<p>Semantically your Chef becomes smarter as it better understands you and can better suggest appropriate choices.   Since there are 4-6 eating occurrences a day, that leaves plenty of activities to recommend, suggest, save-on, group up with, etc.  GPS enable, digitally connect to, get coupon aware of, knowledgeably interfaced to, socially wired with, aggregated real-time content, and continually getting smarter, better &#38; faster.  Chef aggregates many consumer mobile experiences and associates them with locations and activities that are relevant.  This will save time, money and create something people will want.<p>Revenue Possibilities:
*  Market-maker:  Obviously matching buyer and sellers through relevant markets could create an arbitrage situation.  The foodservice, entertainment, travel and shopping markets are huge. 
*  Digital Coupons:  The hottest market in mobile marketing; create an  avenue to organize, manage and facilitate increased coupons redemption for maximized value.
*  Social Network Effect:  Talk to your friends around food and circumstances.  Start conversations.   Increase the amount of traffic.  Tell your friends. earn points.  Be fired up, tell more friends; you're friends are doing the same.  Sell &#38; monetize advertising to them.
*  Digital Wallet/ ChefCard:  Digitally branded wallet enabled by mobile commerce on individuals' personal communications devices.  Electronic or Plastic.  Take a piece of each transaction.
*  CRM:  Obviously after meshing the incoming/outgoing data, a large bit of information could be harvested to sell to companies looking to improve their customer service management &#38; better manage their mobile strategy.
*   Levels:  Subscription based model for people looking to upgrade their status.  Different levels, different rewards.  A system influenced by status and credibility.  It is a game you know?<p>Why this company is different:  We are a marketing company looking for a combination of  technology interfaces, not a technology company looking for marketing.  The space is solid.  The concept is unique, marketable and defensible.<p>Me:  Grew up in the Seattle area.  Graduated from the Univ. of Arizona with a degree in Mktg, Comm &#38; Poly Sci.  Held various leadership positions through college and worked for Senator John McCain in communications and stumped speeched for him numerous times.  Got entrepreneurial, moved to San Francisco and started, operated and sold a coffee company.  Worked as a consultant, taught classes on how to start a coffee business, created business plans for three years and actually helped opened a few.  Took some graduate classes in Marketing, Corporate Finance, and Internet Business Technology at USF and UCB.  Graduated SF Renaissance Entrepreneurship Course.  Worked in sales for illy caffe, Sysco Foodservice, and Restaurant.com, all while finding reinforcement for the critical need for this product.  Moved to Maui three years ago with a girl to escape the city and find a beach, a backyard and a dog.  I'll miss the weather, the surf and the dog, but I need to start this company.  I enjoy eating, skiing, playing tennis, golf and backgammon.  I've done two triathlon sprints and a few 60+ mile bike races and find myself competitive.  I'm pretty easy to get along with and really want to see this company work.  It's been nine years waiting for the right timing to start this..  and its time to apply to Top Gun.  I want to learn to fly jets (Internet technology companies) with the best of the best at Top Gun training (@YC) and  need two wingmen/wingwomen to help fly this jet.<p>What I need:  Smart, intelligent people to help make the foundation of this work efficiently.  Two wingmen/wingwomen to help fly the jet at first and a few people on the ground as ground support and advisers.<p>Especially the Co-Founders:  Two stellar hackers who see the vision and have the skills to execute what this needs.  One a wizard with code, who can program and CTO the project with scaling in mind architecturally. The other a master of the pixels who can make the UI appealing, compelling and clean graphically.   Be cool, calm and wicked smart.<p>More Smart People:  If you find yourself mildly interested in this, please just let me know any thoughts, comments or critiques.  Of course this jet is going to need a few good advisers as well because this is going to attack a big space and the more incredibly smart people involved, the better.  If you hate it, and think it sucks... kindly tell me that as well.   Mahalo either way.<p>Thanks so much for reading this and forming a thought, comment, critique or response.  WAR YC10!   Do something new;  embrace the digital future!    Further inquiry- let me know ---  jtrendall AT gmail  DOT com.
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ismarc
So you want to create a virtual personal assistant that has instant access to
real-time information to provide you with the best formulated advice given
your request? You want it to additionally adapt to the decisions you make
based on the information it provides so that it can increase the quality of
suggestions for the user over time?

If the above is true, targetting WinMO, iPhone and Android models, you're
looking at a client/server model with the core data on the server and data
interpretation model on the device (for out of band suggestions, cache recent
data on the device). You can then use a HTTP based model for fetching the data
(client certificate for authentication so you have control over which clients
can connect).

Or, you can go a different route and provide a web-based service that does the
same thing and offer login's to track individual user decisions. This can be a
fairly simple front end, several clicks and you're at the result ("I'm hungry"
"Something close/something cheap" "Here's your list of suggestions").
Additionally, you can expose an API for access to the decision making/result
sets and allow others to utilize that API (access control however you would
like, an open API would probably get a large number of adopters to write the
mobile clients for you, increasing the user base without the headache of
supporting multiple devices, instead focusing on the API and core logic).

Only drawback I see to the web based implementation is the inability to get
more than a really course location, but adding the ability to supply
coordinates to the API and provide geo-ip based location for web-based would
satisfy that.

My take on your description sounds like something I'd use, and the algorithms
to do this sort of thing already exist (I'd use simple decision tree logic and
stop when it's at 4-6 possible solutions and some fuzzing for variety,
including the possibility to ignore a choice or two once it's been drilled
down a bit to allow for some real variety.)

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saychef
__what a flippin' great comment. thank you. insight and direction- nice work!
mahalo. what are doing for the next couple months? want to help start a start-
up?

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jasonlbaptiste
Interesting concept, but way too complex. Take three paragraphs and condense
it into 3 sentences. You'll be more focused, leaner, and more targeted.

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saychef
thanks, yet this is why we are looking for structured training.

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jacquesm
I can't help but feel sorry for the dog.

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saychef
Don't feel too bad for Fuzzy, we adopted her from the humane society & she now
lives by eating steak and going to the beach everyday,

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jacquesm
That's good to hear.

I emigrated a while ago and we did everything we could in order to bring our
dogs with us, it probably cost more to move the dogs than it did to move us.

But a dog in the city is also no good so I can see at least one good reason
why the current situation is better.

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saychef
I'd smuggle her to the Bay Area in a heartbeat, but she's got to stay with the
ex. :(

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ddemchuk
This reads like it was written by a marketing major...you need to be able to
tell someone what this does in one sentence. Not a sentence of list items
chopped up with commas.

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saychef
It was. How do we write this in one sentence? That is the question of the day.
Coding it; that is the primary issue.

