Not in New York, but still excited by our write-up of Web food-ordering service Wakozi last week and the prospect of ordering snacks from your browser? Check out CityMint, a free service that links you up with the menus and ordering information for local food places. The service's claim to fame is its iPhone-optimized Web app, but users get a much richer experience on their regular desktop browsers.
Order food on your iPhone or other mobile device with CityMint.
(Credit: CNET Networks)Like Wakozi, CityMint lets you browse the menus and inventory selections of local places and add various items to a single order. It'll tell you which places deliver, what the minimum bill is for delivery, and let you charge it right from your phone. When you sign up, you can set up a credit card to be linked to your account. CityMint will then automatically do the transaction for you, as well as giving you a confirmation via e-mail with your estimated delivery time, what you ordered, and a receipt.
One thing CityMint is missing (for the time being) is information on the ever-changing specials at your local eateries. For example, the curry place right around the corner from CNET's San Francisco offices has $6 lunch combos that cost a third of the regular menu counterparts. They change on a weekly basis, and weren't featured on the list of available items on the restaurant's CityMint menu. At the same time, I found a nebulous "pizza special" in another local place, which managed to not tell me what actually came with it. Until that gets fine-tuned, there's a section called "delectable deals," which has some specials and coupons at participating retailers. Ideally, I'd like to see this section get tied in more closely in each place's menu pages.
For power users, the service lets you bookmark items you order frequently to save you some time. I know a few folks who go to the same two or three places every week and get the same thing. This would easily save them a half-hour or more each week just in wait time. There's also a system called Mint Codes that lets you create a bundle of your favorite items and order them anytime via short code SMS. You simply send the code word you set up, and it will order it for you, bill it to your card, and send the food on its way. Awesome.
CityMint joins a small group of other online food delivery services. There's Delivery.com, the aforementioned Wakozi, and GopherNow, which I checked out back in July of last year. Also worth mentioning is the grandfather of them all, Kozmo, which went under back in 2001.
With services like Wakozi around, the movie Half Baked likely would have been about 15 minutes long. The home delivery service has been designed with people of leisure in mind, linking up New Yorkers with local eateries and convenience stores that get solid and liquid nutritional goodness to their doors within the hour.
Unlike online grocery stores of yore, Wakozi's not doing any of the stocking or infrastructure necessary to get products out on its own; instead it's just acting as the middle man to get hungry people (or those in need of the spare roll of toilet paper at the most inopportune times) the means to get items delivered fast, and with just a few clicks.
The system works by matching you up with businesses that deliver within a certain geographical threshold. After plugging in your address, you can view an entire listing of these businesses, as well as their menus, delivery charges, hours of business, and estimated time of food arrival. Many promise delivery within half an hour, although others simply list the nebulous "ASAP."
Since launching less than two months ago, creator Robert Rizzo says the site's user base has increased weekly by more than 100 percent. He also says that one of the things that makes his system so potentially powerful is that it tracks what items are selling for each retailer, so they can stock up on items that are popular with the home delivery crowd.
Also worth noting is that the company hasn't spent a dime on advertising, and doesn't plan to until it raises its first round of funding. In the meantime, it's expanding into other areas of New York, including Brooklyn and Queens, before launching in two more major cities later this year.
New Yorkers can order all the essentials on Wakozi, a service that links people up to local shops that deliver at all hours of the day. (click to enlarge)
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