The List was determined by 'brilliance" which expresses itself in many ways--from the esoteric tinkerings of a mad genius to the profit-heavy balance sheets that illustrate the work of astute executives. Sometimes brilliance is merely a deceptively simple, why-hasn't-anyone-thought-of-this-before solution to a nagging problem.

Ordr.in also received positive coverage:

ReadWriteWeb: Order Food without Leaving FaceBook

WOMMA: I crave that place

QSR Leader: Ordr.in to power restaurant order taking "anywhere," turn devices, sites into new marketing channels. This publication, Quick Serve Leader wnet on to call Ordr.in "one of Ten Technologies to Watch in 2012."

Well done team!

By Rick Zambrano - www.QuickServeLeader.com - May 2012

In the future, diners will be able to order food from any device, including their TV, game consoles, and cable interactive menus. These devices will carry software that will connect and order food for them and even suggest delivery places nearby, seamlessly with the TV viewing and gaming experience. Ordr.in is the company that plans to bring this future to restaurants and its customers sooner rather than later, by way of its proprietary software.

“We are a tool to connect restaurants with customers wherever the customer is, and let that customer transact however they want," says David Bloom, CEO and co-founder of Ordr.in. "We are a new, powerful and efficient part of a restaurant's marketing activities."

And people are taking notice, including the powers that be at Google Ventures, which invested in October.

Ordr.in, founded in 2010, provides software to allow third party publishers to launch their own food ordering systems, connected to a national network of partner restaurants. These new food ordering services can be anywhere or on any website, app or even internet-connected devices like a cable box. One Ordr.in client is Wyndham Hotels. Ordr.in software powers the hotel chain’s “virtual room service” widget on their guest Wi-Fi, letting guests order food for delivery from local restaurants.

For restaurants, they can access a typically hard-to-reach customer group.

In addition to powering other food ordering sites, Ordr.in is now building food ordering apps that restaurants can use on their own website. Recently, Ordr.in announced the industry’s first Facebook timeline integration. Restaurants can register with Ordr.in to get their own branded version for their own Facebook page.  When customers order using the app, the order will be announced on their own Timelines and in their friends’ news feeds, a great marketing and branding tool for local restaurants.

The New York-based company also helps customers build their own ordering tools. "We can also turn around and help restaurants launch their own way of offering food ordering," says Bloom. He adds that Ordr.in can layer on top of solutions in which a restaurant already invested.

The 'Future' of Ordering

"We become the new marketing channel by building on top of what they've already deployed or giving them their own e-commerce," says Bloom. One of the main goals of the company is to become the engine that connects restaurants with customers, much like the travel booking engine Sabre connects travel sites and agents to lodging, vacation properties, airlines, and more.

“Sabre acts as that agent between them," says Bloom. "So we act like that plug-in. We have that app that will have hundreds of thousands of restaurants on it." He's betting that restaurants won't want to replicate their ordering capabilities or partnerships one after another, each time they’re approached with a new marketing opportunity, due to the inconvenience. He says once the restaurant's menu is listed with Ordr.in, it can then be "pushed out," or published on many other sites that are relevant for ordering.

Restaurateurs are often challenged in finding new guests to come to their venues, deciding how to spend their marketing to attract new guests. Ordr.in provides the tools to connect restaurants with publishers, who indirectly offer new sets of customers. It also creates the tools that enable restaurateurs to accept online ordering.

While it currently uses ordering partners, such as OLO, to provide web ordering capability to restaurants, the company is adding its own web and mobile for IOS (iPhone, iPad) and Android ordering engine this summer.

Ordr.in's co-founder says the company is working on new opportunities similar to the one it found in enabling partner ordering through vacation properties such as Wyndham Hotels. "There are no announcements yet, but we're thinking very big."

Ordering Anytime, Anywhere

The technology behind Ordr.in will also find itself on interactive menus, including those on customers’ TV's, as well as cable and game consoles. "We are a software that turns any device into one that can engage with restaurants," adds Bloom. "The restaurant industry fundamentally forces the customer to go to it for a specific experience; and what we want to do is to create new and theoretically infinite ways of customers finding the restaurants and shopping the merchants."

Bloom says that ordering hasn't changed much since the 90's when ordering sites created "virtual food courts," now represented by companies like GrubHub and Seamless. He plans to revolutionize food ordering.

Restaurants may be concerned about fees and whether Ordr.in's new funnels for ordering will cannibalize less costly sales, through the phone for example.

Bloom counters that customers, whether on the Internet or watching TV, are going to interact in the ways they prefer with restaurants. In addition to bringing new customers, allowing existing customers to order food through new channels at a cost of five percent is reasonable, he suggests.

"For the five percent, if there is a consumer that wants to watch TV and order in that way, then make that consumer happy," Bloom quips. "You are already putting the dressing on the side, or packaging it separately, which has some operational issues."

In the short-term, the company is considering flat rate fees, which will result in lower costs to restaurants, on a percentage-basis. With some hefty backing, and big thinking, Ordr.in is a "top 10 technology" to watch in the restaurant industry in 2012.

 

Link to original Article on www.QuickServeLeader.com

Romotive was written up in BusinessInsider. To excerpt the coverage:

The Company,  based in Las Vegas that will soon have its robots sold in stores nationwide. More than 2,000 of its devices were ordered on Kickstarter before there was a product to ship, and CEO Keller Rinaudo wants to put a robot in every household by 2022.

"We grew up watching movies with amazing robots," says Rinaudo.  "Unfortunately they suck today.  They're either cheap plastic toys that break or they cost $5 million dollars. That's a huge gap. There needs to be one that's affordable that can do normal things."

Right now, Romotive is just a mini car that an iPhone, Android, or iPad can control. The mobile device becomes the brain of the robot on wheels. But it wants to create a robot API so developers can create actions for its smart phone-controlled devices.

Products like Romotive's and Bandai's are the future of toys and mobile gaming -- they're toys that keep evolving without ever having to buy new versions. Product improvements will be downloaded, not bought.

Kane Hsieh

Romotive co-founder Keller RInaudo plays with the smart phone robot, Romo.

Rinaudo says the amount of time spent on computers five years ago is the amount of time spent on mobile devices today. He believes that's also the amount of time we'll spend interacting with robots five years from today.

According to the article, in the US, robotics is a $1.35 billion industry; It's a $20 billion industry globally. By 2015, personal robots are expected to be a $15 billion industry. Robitics is expected to become a $70 billion industry by 2025.

Right now, robots are seen most in big industries like automotive, aerospace, and pharmaceutical, and they come with a hefty price tag.  But they're starting to become more mainstream. The National Robotics Initiative, for example, is spending $70 million to design "co-robots" that help and interact with people, like the elderly.  

Robots are getting easier to make, too. Willow Garage is creating an ROS (Robot Operating System) so developers can create robot applications, much like they develop mobile apps and games.

As robots become cheaper to produce, they'll make everything cheaper to produce. The average salary of a Chinese worker is $3 an hour -- the average cost of running a small robot factory in China is $0.15 per hour.

Venture Capitalists are noticing the robotics trend and they're pouring more money into these companies -- $160 million in 2011 -- than ever before. Soon you'll be picking out personal robots instead of personal computers from the shelves of stores like Best Buy.

 “What we’re doing now is culling together sentiment analysis from a variety of data providers,” cofounder Adrian Grant explained. “We then combine them in hopes of normalizing the dataset. Then we rank them by positive mentions, number of mentions, who is saying the comment and various other components that have their own respective weights assigned to them.”

Read the article on BetaBeat.

See the list here on Buellr.com.

This week, Deepthi Welaratna joined Ordr.in as Director of Marketing. She is responsible for all aspects of Ordr.in’s brand, communication and community engagement. We are thrilled to have her and humbled that she joined Ordr.in.

See where Deepthi has worked here, learn more about her here, and follow her ramblings here. You will find a fun, thoughtful and dedicated person. A great partner and wonderful new colleague.

So much terrific stuff ahead.  We will get there faster and better with Deepthi on the team.

Read more: http://ordrin.tumblr.com/#ixzz1t9idVjbP

For decades, Silicon Valley has been synonymous with innovation. It is difficult to dispute this claim given that it’s the home to technology and Internet giants such as Apple, Google, and Facebook. While it hasn’t lost its staying power, other hotspots for entrepreneurship and technology have emerged over the past ten years, in particular, New York’s “Silicon Alley”.

Although cities like Chicago, Austin, and even our own Research Triangle have produced a number of web-based businesses in recent years, New York’s startup scene is growing exponentially. The amount of capital and seed funding continues to rise as well as the success of local companies like foursquare, Gilt Groupe, and Tumblr. The city’s ecosystem also has the support of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who recently appointed Rachel Sterne as the city’s Chief Digital Officer along with Steve Rosenbaum, the city’s first Entrepreneur at Large.

There’s no shortage of debates in the blogosphere as to whether one coast has the advantage over the other. Regardless of what side you’re on, many would agree that there’s no better time to be an entrepreneur. Organizations and incubators like the Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC), Startup America, Y-Combinator and Tech Stars are providing an unprecedented level of resources and support. In a recent TIME article, the YEC’s Scott Gerber even posited 2012 as “The Year of the Entrepreneur”.

Interested in seeing the growth that has been present on both coasts over the last 5 years? Interact with the graphic below to explore some noteworthy companies in both Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley, quotes from stakeholders, as well as the rise in Seed Funding from 2009-2011.

Via MBA@UNC: Online MBA

There are many new deals int he works, so please stay tuned and we will post the news as we are permitted.

Also, the company has asked James Haft, principal of PALgenesis, to be an advisor to the board of the company to provide guidance through this coming growth stage.

PALgenesis has announced it will invest in the Series "A" round of Romotive, make of the newly introduced Romo robot, which is powered by a common iPhone andcontrolled remmotely from any web enabled device.

The founders and chief nerds – Keller Rinaudo, Peter Seid and Phu Nguyen – have turned your smartphone into a robot. They’ve built a robotics platform that uses a smartphone for a brain to control a mobile, two-track base. Just attach your smartphone to the base, plug a cord into the earphone jack, download the apps, and using another smartphone, iPad, or computer to control it – you’ve got a robot! The guys are only just getting started, but already they’ve made a “Spy Robot” app that allows you to drive Romo around while seeing the world through the smartphone camera. It can track objects with a color tracking app. Another app turns Romo into a doodler. Just make your drawing on the smartphone touchscreen and Romo follows the pattern, driving around and turning your pixel drawing into a real one. You can also have a conversation with Romo, which makes sense since it has a phone for a head.

The round is expected to close in early January. Stay tuned!

Romo has something to say! from Romotive on Vimeo.