Jonathan Kaplan, inventor of the successful low-cost one-button Flip camcorder, is out of the CE business. His attentions are now elsewhere... with restaurants selling melted-cheese sandwiches and soups.
Quite a move from running Pure Digital, a company so successful it was bought by Cisco for $590 million worth in stock back in 2009. Pure Digital had sold around 1.5M cameras at the time, and Cisco had ambitions for its consumer division... ambitions Cisco scrapped, slashing the Flip business outright (without even considering putting it on sale) on April 2011.
The death of the Flip was no concern for Kaplan, who now runs "The Melt," a restaurant chain has a high-tech twist on the decidedly low-tech act of buying the most simple of lunchtime snacks-- an ordering system using smartphones to generate ordering QR codes, which one scans in-store to place an order.
Of course The Melt is super fancy. It not only uses "artisinal" bread and "aged all-natural cheese" (all prepared using custom-made Electrolux panini makers) but even has Apple Store creator Ron Johnson and Michael Mina (owner of Esquire's 2011 restaurant of the year) on the board.
Kaplan is not the first tech veteran to switch to the food business-- for instance ex-Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold wrote Modernist Cuisine, a 6-volume $625 cookbook series, while Twitter founder Jack Dorsey runs the Sightglass Coffee café chain.
The Melt currently has 4 restaurants spread around the San Francisco Bay Area, and Kaplan has plans to open 500 Melts across the US over the next 5 years. Let us know if you manage to taste their offerings-- and test out the ordering system-- should you be in the States sometime soon...
Go The Melt
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