Discussion on:

Four industries about to be transformed by the Internet

I'm still waiting for my refrigirator to start do grossery shopping for me...

sure won't be that diffficult to have your refrigerator identify what you're lacking of and send to your cell phone the updated list for your next shopping... or even more, send the list to your favorite store, so you can just pick it up while coming back from work or even have it delivered... not 'do the shopping' but surely half the work. Cheers.

Why would the refrigerator not call the store when your preset minimums are reached... The pantry as well, and then when the digital order is placed, the store chain can make suggestions for spices that will go well with your salmon or a new cream cheese spread for your ordered bagels... Oh yeah...

the stores start push selling and your fridge and pantry are full of what the store had most stock of. You then have to purchase the arbitration versions of the fridge and pantry systems that cost 4 x as much, but it's all for your peace of mind. Then you will have to have the vocal version that chats to you when your in the kitchen as you now miss your chats at the veg shop.

Can't wait until weather.com tells the fridge there's a chance of snow so that it can stock up on enough milk and sugar for two weeks.

Aungba Man writes:
"so that it can stock up on enough milk and sugar for two weeks"
Do you keep your sugar in the fridge? I usually have enough sugar for well over 2 weeks anyway and kept in a cupboard.

And with this, machines start spending our hard earned money all by themselves without us "having to worry"... ouch.
If the stores don't jump on the push selling wagon, maybe will see refrigerators that eat the food themselves to produce electricity to continue operating and ordering. The future of business, sell to machines too .

We'll all be broke before long.

First of all, there are a lot of grocery items that don't come anywhere near the refrigerator. If I open a can of soup or beans, will I have to swipe the thing in front of the refrigerator's bar code reader????

Second, beyond a few items like milk and eggs, what I want from the grocery is determined by what I want to eat, not machine's minimum stock level.

Precisely my next point. Dunno about youse guys, but I don't eat precisely the same thing for b, l & d every night, every week, or even every month. So by all means track your alcohol (beers, wine, champagne, etc.) - which I think may be a constant requirement - but tracking my supply of a specific range of food items is completely impractical and irrelevant.

Beer and wine anyway, champagne I tend to save for special occasions!

There are already android apps that keep track of your "pantry " inventory an d even tell you when a product is going to expire. I'm pretty sure there are also iPad,Phone,Pod apps that do the same thing. Not much of a leap to add an embedded app into the fridge with an external scanner. Some restaurants are already using similar technology.

But seriously the biggest changing industry is tech support services. No longer have to get in the car and go to the clients office (unless its a catastrophic failure) but simply log on and fix it quickly without having to waste travel time.

You have two dustbins, one for things you liked and one for things you didn't like. The bins scan the bar codes on everything you throw away. When you throw away something you liked, the dustbin queues an order for another one.

kjohnson, I love your solution! What could be simpler or better?

Suppose I go on a diet and stop eating a previous regularly bought food such as chocolate. When the chocolate stock in the fridge gets low I absolutely do NOT want to buy more. I agree 100% with Lazarus439 on this. By all means have a fridge which monitors stock levels but to automatically buy more when stock runs low is a recipe for wasted money and wasted food. A friend of mine was in charge of a bookstore which implemented a stock level monitoring and automatic reorder system. The store had a particular book that was not selling at all well. They'd just got rid of the last copy when, against my friend's wishes, the system automatically ordered more of this difficult to sell (=unprofitable) title. System designers need to understand what customers want, not come up with a theoretical solution which doesn't do what is required.

If an "ignore" section is added to the system, or a code prefix meant to make the system do the same thing then this kind of thing can be stopped.

I used to use sage line 50 for a retail outlet, and because of records laws I still had to keep information regarding items I had discontinued (non-profit/ manufacturer end of line etc) on the system. A simple prefix allowed it to ignore all of them when calling up codes for sales, re-ordering and stocktake. I don't know why all systems don't do it.

I go regularly to a hardware outlet, and it's pretty common to be sold an item under the wrong code (and therefore price) say 16mm ply WBP instead of normal. Obviously I only point out the mistake it it's over the normal price, if it's under it's their own fault for not sorting it despite numerous errors, and no I don't feel bad because it's a multi million pound company that could afford to fix it.

I hand pick my fresh veggies, fruits and meats. Not going to trust someone else to do it for me.

automatically discard perfectly good food just because the "expiration" date has passed. Gotta protect us from illness, ya know. It could even automatically report us to the CDC, FDA, Dept of Agriculture or even Social Services (for those with children) for health violations or not having nutritionally appropriate food available.

I loooove the idea of suggesting other ingredients and condiments that match your "required" list. How about if, after your fridge sends the list to the store, the store matches your list to a recipe database and suggests new recipes & the two or three ingredients you may be missing to complete the recipe. YUM. I would totally go for that.

Except the grossery is already IN my refrigerator! And I'm not even sure what some of it is anymore. I just keep muttering "IPv6 will solve THIS problem!" and then quietly shut the door.

It is high time folks that we stop relying toooooooo much on technology. What if a robot can remember, get alerted and eat on my behalf! height of ... ugh. Why can't we think about walking a few miles to replenish our grocery that can be very refreshing - also keeps us fit and healthy. Better we follow those oldie charm. God bless

For a community to thrive, it needs a full range of services and job opportunities. Small and mid-size enterprises provide for both.

Somehow I don't think we'll stem the tide as eventually the Amazons and Walmarts will crush our local flavor... and those lucky few of us might still have jobs with our new bosses in Bangalore, Stuttgart, and Bejing.

I'm very scared to think what we'll become 20 years from now when everything including the food we eat is controlled by technology. I know it is at the present moment, but when you're talking about having you foodstuffs cataloged and regulated where we obtain food based on what the computer is telling us is the epitome of overkill. There's so many "old skool" skills that our grandparents and their parents had that are no more. I'm no Rambo are far as survival skills go, but I do know I would shrivel up and die if I had no Internet access, it would be a pain but I would survive.

You're right. The dairies already think they know more about how much fat there should be in a pint of milk than a cow does.

You mean the milk that cows produce for their calves, that was never meant to be a staple of the human diet?