This is the first time in a couple years that I have seen a reference to myself while reading an article. Thanks for the surprise!
> No. They're welcome to have them back anytime they want. They could probably do it pretty forcibly if I refused to budge too (see Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft).
We actually just did something like this, but on a much smaller scale than "a giant warehouse".
We've (https://myaccio.com/) been running as a premium delivery service in Victoria, BC for a few years. Instead of taking a 25-30% discount from restaurants we were marking items up by 20%. We deliver mostly from the "good" restaurants who can't afford to take a 25-30% hit just to provide delivery. While this was turning into a good lifestyle business, delivering food when you don't control all the variables is extremely hard (and not exactly profitable at a small scale).
What we ended up making was "The Kitchen by Accio". It's high end delivery food made by extremely talented chefs. There are four concepts to choose from each with its own head chef. We launched just over 3 weeks ago and things are going pretty well so far. We still deliver from other restaurants but we've noticed that a growing population of our "regulars" are starting to just order from The Kitchen.
One of my first websites was an emulation site in 1999/2000. SNES was by far the most popular category on the site so I had the bright idea to play 2-3 minutes of every single game in order to take a screenshot of the game-play. Three months later I was finally done. Then I lost everything in hard drive crash before I could push the new version of my site live. Dammit.
One of the developers in my company built this as a side project. There is only one world so far, but you can test out the new world "Icy Blocks" by going to http://platformpixels.com/worlds/icy-blocks.
I never got sued. They just sent me a cease and desist letter telling me to stop using the domain. I went to the media with that and it all blew out of proportion from there. The only thing I was ever at risk of losing was my domain name. I ended up selling out for a bunch of goodies and a couple trips to Redmond.
I'm pretty much the opposite of that Mike Rowe. I've never worked a day of hard labour in my life. I've considered starting a YouTube channel with me doing clean jobs, but there's only so many times in life you can copy the success of other people/companies.
Well this is kind of weird to see here. Especially since it happened almost 10 years ago. I am Mike Rowe. I can answer any questions if people want. I did an AMA on reddit in 2009 as well http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/ajsih/i_am_the_guy_who....
A team of 4 (now 5) of us have been working on this project for just over a year now. We were able to acquire seed money back in May so that we could work on it full time. We launched in September with a website and iPhone app. We were accepted into an accelerator in Victoria, BC (http://www.acceleratetectoria.com) and since then we have launched in Vancouver, BC, hired a co-op student to develop our Android app and today we just launched our first revenue stream.
The premise behind our site is to help people find the best food in their city, not just the best restaurants. We know there have been different variations of this already, but we are making it more comprehensive. Every item on every menu is searchable. You can find exactly what you are craving and then take a look at photos, ratings and comments. From there you can go and check out what else the restaurant that serves that dish has to offer.
Our first revenue stream is “Time Sensitive Deals”. We are aiming to help restaurants fill their empty seats during off-peak hours (for example, 2-4PM on a Tuesday). Verified restaurant accounts can post a deal instantly to our site and mobile apps. They can set the times it’s valid between, their discount and any rules they might have (not valid on alcohol, 1 per table, etc). This is completely free for them. We make our money by charging our users to buy this deal. For example, a $5 savings would cost our user $0.99. A $10 savings would cost our user $1.99.
We developed ForkJoy in node.js with mongoDB. For search, we use elasticsearch.
We will be launching in San Francisco in April with Portland and Seattle following soon after. We also hope to have our Android app in the marketplace close to our SF launch.
We would love to hear your comments, complaints and criticisms.
> No. They're welcome to have them back anytime they want. They could probably do it pretty forcibly if I refused to budge too (see Microsoft vs. MikeRoweSoft).