
This Software Tracks Everything You Do at Restaurants and Nightclubs - SQL2219
http://fortune.com/2016/09/29/sevenrooms-nightclub-restaurant/
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faitswulff
Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), this software isn't as creepy as I had
hoped. It doesn't use computer vision to literally track club-goers, it simply
allows the doormen to check someone's identity:

"...they saw doormen turn away celebrities, billionaires, and in one instance,
even the owner of the nightclub....In this game of “who’s who,” a doorman can
literally lose his job if he doesn’t know who’s standing in front of him."

Seven Rooms, the startup in question, is basically a CRM for doormen with
additional tie-ins to the POS to track sales history. The idea is to know
someone's celebrity status in order to ingratiate them to the club.

Also, a warning: there is auto-playing video in the link.

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mason55
> _The idea is to know someone 's celebrity status in order to ingratiate them
> to the club._

Restaurants at least don't have a problem with this right now. High-end
restaurants will have pre-service meetings where they discuss all the VIPs
coming in that day to make sure that both back of house and front of house
know exactly who's coming and what they want.

The real step forward, which they mentioned in the last sentence of the
article, will be when you can treat the random Joe like you can a VIP. Let's
I've been to two different properties that you own and spent a total of $300.
I walk in to a new restaurant and your sommelier says "I see you like jammy
pinot noirs from Oregon at the $50 price point, let me recommend this bottle"
then you can make everyone feel like a VIP.

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greenyoda
I'm not sure that it's a step forward, since someone who I've never met before
getting my preferences from a database definitely lacks the human touch. It
has about as much charm as getting a recommendation from Amazon based on my
purchase history.

At the sushi restaurant where I'm a regular, I'm personally recognized and
greeted when I walk in. (They can't ID me by my reservation, since I never
make reservations.) No amount of computer-driven "VIP treatment" could
substitute for that.

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joezydeco
_" For instance, the startup analyzed customer orders of a high-end New York
City nightclub, and the findings were eye-opening. Across all vodka orders in
the last two years, 50% of customers ordered Grey Goose, 25% ordered
Belvedere, and 5% ordered Ketel One."_

So what's more puzzling is that most bars and clubs use standard restaurant
POS systems, and nobody has ever offered any kind of deep analysis like this
before?

It kind of makes me think that there's an opportunity to do this for some if
the larger restaurant chains, if they're not trying it already.

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mason55
My girlfriend works in fine dining in NYC and we were just talking about this.
Apparently her restaurant group tried a similar service a couple years ago.
The big problems were getting everything integrated (POS, OpenTable,
everything else) in a way that wasn't buggy and then providing that
information to the servers in a way that made sense. At a high end (multiple
Michelin stars) restaurant you can't have the servers walking around with
iPads and space is at a premium. They also had trouble tuning the amount of
information that the servers were seeing so that it was quickly actionable.

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existencebox
The funny thing to me is, something like this would have been a _flawless_
application of something like google glass; it always surprised me they
marketed as more of a "style/fashion" product more than as a domain specific
industry tool. (can see similar applications by doctors, construction/cive,
and even sysadmin work; the potential of a very simple hands free minimal
text-HUD with some very naive sensors and network capabilities would provide a
LOT of value)

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janci
How do they identify the clients across multiple visits? (What unique and
always present identifier they use?)

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caseysoftware
Credit card is probably a reasonable lookup most of the time. When (most)
people open a tab, they'll have to hand one over briefly.

While name collisions happen, within a segment this specific, it's probably
rare. If you were trying to do it across all Walmart stores, it would be a
constant problem.

