Ever had to wait in line?

Apple is creating the future again with its partnership with Starbucks. What’s great is how the two can so easily support each other given the way they are organized. The basic problem they are solving is “How can you optimize drinks reaching people within a confined space (store/venue/booth)?”.

Apple can reach people with iPhones or iPodTouches via their infrastructure. They have the software (iTunes), the hardware (iPhones) and payment system (iTunes) and now partnership with a physical location and service provider(Starbucks).

Of course being one of the dudes behind the roomware project and although loving Apple for making great stuff, their remains that niggling question of whether this whole infrastructure could be more open? Could you do the same using Roomware Project code? Well perhaps. Certainly you need the right service providing partner who is willing to experiment. .

How this could happen? You need to be able to: receive the menu, need a mobile device that is the interface for making choices and send/receiving data, it would be nice if you could do payments automatically as money transactions are a big time hole, although not mandatory. You then need a partner willing to try this out. This is just a sketch, but it sure would be nice to get into a faster lane like we see in Starbucks (if you have an iPhone) or as happens when traveling and having a pre-printed boarding pass, stepping straight through customs.

So what do you think? Is this kind of problem something easily solved using our open source software (or that of other OS software providers) or are the hurdles just too high?