Consumers Embrace Technology for Orders Source: 2019 Technomic/National Restaurant Association—1500 Consumers Surveyed
Ordering Methods Used in Past Year:
Sandra Bullock inadvertently helped spark an online ordering revolution with her role in the 1995 film, The Net.
Jobs’ influence on pizza is a story that has been largely forgotten. Not only did his WebObjects technology, developed during his hiatus from Apple in the late 1980s and early 1990s, lay the groundwork for today’s online ordering capabilities, Jobs made pizza history when he placed the first online order for CyberSlice, a company that would set into motion an e-commerce revolution that has transformed the restaurant industry. Bullock, meanwhile, starred in “The Net,” a 1995 film that was pretty forgettable in its own right. Yet, ironically, one brief throwaway scene in its opening moments provided the inspiration for the aforementioned CyberSlice—and for the world of online ordering that we take for granted today. Finally, PMQ publisher Steve Green played his own role in the saga as a marketing consultant for CyberSlice. Here’s the story of how it all went down—and why online ordering is now a must-have for pizza restaurant owners across the country. THE RISE OF CYBERSLICE
Unlike the less familiar story of CyberSlice, Steve Jobs’ rise, fall and comeback is the stuff of legend. Ousted from Apple in 1985, the 30-year-old Jobs wasted little time in building a 30 PMQ PIZZA MAGAZINE | THE WORLD’S AUTHORITY ON PIZZA
56% 56% 41% 43% 37% 21% 13%
Use Restaurant’s Own Website Use Telephone to Place Order Use a Third-Party App Use Restaurant’s Own App Use Third-Party Website Use Voice Assistant Via Text
new company that would literally change the world: NeXT, Inc.. His original goal was to build a budget-friendly desktop computer for the higher-education market. But he and his team went further, designing hardware and software that would create a cohesive computing experience for users. Bundled with NeXTSTEP software, NeXT computers went on sale in the late 1980s. Just a few years later, Tim Berners-Lee, a scientist at CERN in Switzerland, used his NeXT computer and its advanced object-oriented development tools to create the World Wide Web—and the digital race was on. In a Wired interview in 1996, Jobs predicted e-commerce on the Web would transform the American marketplace. “If the Web got up to 10% of the goods and services in this country, it would be phenomenal,” Jobs said. “I think it’ll go much higher than that. Eventually, it will become a huge part of the economy.” After watching “The Net,” Tim Glass, who cofounded CyberSlice in 1996 with Bryan Cupps and Jim Brimhall, had the same idea. In the film, Bullock portrays a hacker who stumbles onto a massive conspiracy rooted in digital technology. The movie’s opening scene depicts Bullock ordering a pizza online through a user interface sporting graphics and features that were quite advanced for the era. It was one of those borderline sci-fi
