bluetooth

Honk if you want pizza

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What is this, bad-but-delicious food day? Completely unrelated to the pizza-ordering fridge magnet comes this: you ordering pizza via your car.

That’s not as in driving to the restaurant, that’s not as in asking KITT where the nearest takeaway is, that’s as in:

The pilot test will let some lucky car owners order a stuffed-crust gut-bomb from the comfort of their drivers’ seats. When the car arrives for pickup in a designated parking spot, bluetooth sensors will alert the Pizza Hut staff of its arrival so they can deliver the pizza to the car. A Visa exec said the company will soon announce the car manufacturers that are on board. It’s not yet clear how many locations will be part of the future pilot test, which will run for three months later this year in Northern California.

“It’s the start of what I hope will be a commercial rollout of not just a frictionless quick-serve restaurant experience but many other use cases,” said Bill Gajda, Visa’s senior vice president of Innovation and Strategic Partnerships, noting pay-by-car opportunities at gas stations and parking meters, too.

Visa Seriously Wants You to Pay for Pizza and Gas With Your Car – Jason Del Rey, Re/code (2 March 2015)

One caveat. This is something announced at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. So it’s a trade show. Trade shows are where companies talk up products they haven’t made yet. And while I don’t know anything about MWC’s track record, I am a cynic over ones such as the Consumer Electronics Show where most products are fantasies. So maybe it’ll happen, maybe it won’t, but if it does then it looks like it will save you the arduous walk from your car to the Pizza Hut counter. And back.

Want: Noke – a bluetooth padlock

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Yes, I was suspicious and/or cynical at first. Fuz Designs has launched a Kickstarted campaign to create Noke, a padlock that requires no key.

You’ve got a lot of questions already but I can predict some of them:

1. Eh?
Lock your bike or whatever you want by snapping the Noke padlock to it as you would any other padlock. Then to unlock it, just press on the Noke – if you have your smartphone with you.

The Noke looks Bluetoothily for a phone that it recognises and if yours is there in range, the padlock opens. You don’t even have to take your phone out of your pocket or purse.

2. Battery
Yeah, that was my first thought: what happens when the battery dies on the Noke. You are screwed. Except that you get a warning on your smartphone Noke app long before that happens and there is also a little secret way around it that you set up in advance.

There’s only one more thing I would say: Fuz Designs made the Everdock, which I backed on Kickstarter before and now use every day. I backed it twice over, buying two of the things. So I both like and trust the firm.

Now, watch their video. I can’t embed it so you need to visit their Kickstarter page – but that does also have a lot more detail. A lot. Check out the Noke Kickstarter page by Fuz Designs.