Yesterday, I posted at BeConnected about Luxury Hotels and how they are using computer networks, databases and automation to seamlessly customize their rooms to enhance the guest experience. Hotel staff notice guest preferences and update guest profiles for everything including temperature, drapery positions and mini-bar preferences. The system even tracks preferred music choices, TV programming and even frequently dialed numbers on the telephone. Gathering all of this customer intuition data helps hotels retain frequent repeat customers.
So how much is a persons preference profile worth? What is it worth to a hotel to know that a guest prefers diet Pepsi vs diet Coke? What about their allergy to feather pillows? What about the fact that a customer is a recovering alcoholic and wants no alcohol in their room and no service at the hotel bar? Each of these pieces of information have different values to the hotel and to the customer.
It's an exchange of information for time, convenience, comfort and maybe even survival. I think there's room for a trusted personal preferences profile provider that collects and provides preference information to businesses serving profiled customers. Businesses could subscribe to the service to find out relevant information about their customers. Customers would participate to enhance their experience.
Part data mining operation, part concierge, part social network, part travel agent, part personal shopper this service would tailor your life experience to your preferences. The more the service knows about you the better your experience. Everything from remembering your father-in-law's birthday and prompting you with the perfect gift ideas to arranging your holiday travel according to your travel preferences would be handled seamlessly.
Your dietary restrictions and preferences would be cross checked against restaurant menus when you seek a recommendation or reservation. The service would not send you to restaurants it knows you would not like. The service would make a reservation for you, provide GPS directions to the restaurant, arrange car/taxi service if needed, provide parking assistance, send you menu selection recommendations, place your food order in advance, order your beverages, pay the bill and tip the wait staff. The social network aspect could alert you to the reviews of friends and contacts who have recently patronized the restaurant or even those currently in the restaurant. The benefits to the consumer are clear. The benefits to the subscribers like the resaurant are happier repeat customers who spread good word of mouth which results in more business.
This would be a huge service but for services like Google, Yahoo and Amazon this would be doable.
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What if Roombas were half the diameter they are now and you could deploy six of them to scour your room? Smaller units could maneuver into smaller spaces. Sure they wouldn't hold much but they could regurgitate their collections in the middle of the room for the parent Roomba to clean up. Mesh network the whole bunch and let the smaller units dock to the parent bot for recharging. The parent unit would be designed to transport and recharge the smaller units, clean up the dumpings of the smaller units and return to the master charging station.
