In South Korea for the past 6-years, cell phone customers have been able to assess coupons and gift certificates via their cellphones. This sounds very neat. As I was reading this I was thinking about how I spent about 30-mins a few days ago going through all the junk mail I recieved fishing for restaurant coupons. I now have purse full of scraps of paper which is a mess I’m not very fond of. In some cases I had to cut out more than the coupon in order to get the address of the restaurant and directions. It would be wonderful if instead I had received these coupons electronically and they could reside on a mobile device so I could have the couple and all the information I need to use the coupon available to me without having to carry around a bunch of paper scraps. Imagine this:

• I have a coupon for Yummy Fine Food Restaurant
• I’m out somewhere and I want to eat there with my coupon
• With my GPS enabled GPS device I know where the nearest Yummy Fine Food Restaurant is and how long it will take for me to get there because traffic data is available
• I let Yummy Fine Food Restaurant know that I’m coming and I will be arriving at approx this time (based on GPS data). Yummy Fine Food Restaurant sends me back a confirmation letting me know that a table will be ready for me.
• My husband Steve is going to meet up with me, so I forward to him the confirmation so he, too, can know the reservation time and have access to the directions
• We get to YFFR, our table is ready and we enjoy ourselves
• Later a restaurant review site asks us for a review of YFFR which we gladly provide

There is a service I currently use that partially allows this called “Open Table.” This is more of a PC based Internet application. I’ve used it for trip planning and I like it very much.

Anyhow, here’s a link to the article.

Link