Touch ‘Salad’ to get the appetizer menu

YGrowth Curve ou sit down at a table for four in your favourite restaurant. You don’t have to wait for the waiter; your table is a 50-inch computer screen, so you can call up virtual menus, and order instantly by pressing hires images of your favourite food or beverage.

While you wait for the starters, you can turn the electronic tabletop into a game, drawing board or TV screen. Play digital air hockey, watch the news, work on a virtual puzzle or share photos from your Facebook account.

There’s no screen like a big screen. Kodisoft, a Ukrainebased company, has developed a table-size screen that recognizes more than 1,000 touch points. Neither broken glass nor the darkest stout will penetrate the touch-sensitive glass surface, which can be up to 22mm thick. In fact, Kodisoft’s new Toronto-based president, 27-year-old Dan McCann, likes to finish his demonstrations by shattering a wine glass on the screen. His key message: these interactive tables are as tough as they are smart.

But McCann has to prove he’s tough and smart, too. He’s a Queen’s University commerce grad who’s spent years seeking the right opportunity. After participating in the first cohort of Next 36, an entrepreneurial program for elite undergrads, he cofounded Stylsize, a company bringing virtual reality to online retail. McCann waited tables to support it, but couldn’t make a go of it.

He then created digital strategies for Johnson & Johnson, before helping an entertainment company develop an immersive entertainment experience. McCann found his next opportunity when Northland Power founder James Temerty, a Ukrainian-born Canadian, asked him to size up a promising new technology from Kyiv.

Dmytro Kostyk, a computer scientist known as Ukraine’s Steve Jobs, had developed a multi-touch digital table, which is now in a handful of restaurants in Eastern Europe and the Middle East. But he had no idea how to sell to Western markets. McCann is now Kodisoft’s president, responsible for selling it in the English-speaking world.

Kostyk calls his smart tables technology “the future of dining.” Having been burned selling other advanced technologies, McCann has developed a patient sales strategy. Rather than sell smart tables to anyone who wants one, he is holding out for a company willing to outfit entire restaurants.

“This isn’t about margins on food and beverage, it’s a paradigm shift,” says McCann. Letting guests order from onscreen menus reduces the number of servers a restaurant needs, and boosts the value of each order by 30 per cent, as guests buy more due to creative promotions.

Besides playing games or watching sports, diners can purchase in-venue services such as choosing the music or ordering gifts for diners at other tables. Plus, participating customers can automatically link their Facebook accounts to the smart table. While they access their socialmedia feeds, the restaurant accesses their user data, enabling personalized settings and customized ads. It’s all about relationships: early indications show 75 per cent of smart-table customers sign in to Facebook, and a mouthwatering 90 per cent provide customer feedback at meal’s end.

Employing an open Windows interface, the smart tables make it easy for retailers to develop unique features. A karaoke bar in Russia found customers will pay money to jump the queue on busy nights. One romantic nightspot lets you buy local services such as flowers and jewelry or order a taxi. Another restaurant exploiting non-intrusive advertising opportunities (e.g., replacing the digital puck in air hockey with a brewery logo) has found ad revenue now accounts for 50 per cent of total sales.

Whether you find these features appetizing or terrifying, it adds up to a long sales cycle. The way to sell transformative tech, McCann has learned, is to get your prospects in front of the product.

At a restaurant show in Toronto last month, McCann shmoozed the MC into promoting his product, then led a parade of industry leaders from organizations such as Pizza Pizza, Cara, A&W and White Spot back to his booth. He even did the wineglass toss to show how vandalproof the product is. “It’s a bit of a party trick,” he admits, but his stunt made it into the show’s closing video.

Kodisoft has raised seed funding that gives McCann a bit of time to select a showcase partner. His goal is to complete one reference deal by year-end, then close multiple deals in 2018. At that point he’ll start focusing on retail and shopping malls. He’s also targeting educational markets, real estate and eventually, people’s homes.