Tech -

by Emily

Apps vs. Cash Money: How Do You Pay Your Tab?

I guess it’s not fair to say I had lunch with Tabbedout because, more accurately, I had lunch with Ashley, a longtime ES reader/commenter and fellow blogger (at Quarter Life (Crisis) Cuisine) who recently moved to Austin! She just happens to also work in marketing for Tabbedout.

Have you used Tabbedout before? I’d heard of it, but never actually used it or even saw it in action before Ashley met me for lunch. (Speaking of lunch, shout out to the lovely Winflo Osteria and their ultra-delicious Neapolitan-style pizzas. See above for evidence of their glory.) Anyway, it’s basically an app that helps you easily split and pay your bill at various bars and restaurants. Usually when I’m trying to split a bill with friends and we don’t have cash or whatever, one of us will put everything on their card and then the rest of us will Venmo whoever paid. This cuts out the middleman, which is pretty nice.

Unlike my beloved Venmo (my friends and I seriously use that for everything from paying rent to buying concert tickets to splitting Thai takeout), Tabbedout is specifically for dining in restaurants and bars. It’s pretty easy to use, too – first, you download the app, make yourself a little profile, and load in your credit card information. Then when you’re at an establishment that takes Tabbedout, you just let your server know you want to open a TO tab, then at the end of the night (or whenever you’re ready to go) you just pay directly through your phone. You don’t even have to wait to ask for your check.

So is this it? As time goes on and technology advances, apps like Tabbedout and will become even easier to use and accepted by more and more restaurants. What do you think – is cash money basically becoming obsolete these days?

in Trends 0 comments

by Russell Warnick

Cooking at the Consumer Electronics Show

We can’t let the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Vegas go by unnoticed. We here at ES still choose the iPhone over Google’s entry into the smart phone world, Nexus One, but we’re not for passing up an opportunity to talk about some sexy kitchen toys. I’ve found (from my office desk, not Vegas 🙁 ) the funkiest and perhaps most useless kitchen items to ever grace the earth currently.

MyDemy (above) is to cooks what Kindle is to avid readers: an all in one recipe book, timer, conversion chart and ingredient substitution thingy. It’s “kitchen safe” which basically means you can splash a few drops of water on it and you’ll be fine, just don’t drop it in a pot of boiling oil.

The MyDemy does seem like a great tool for storing all of your personal recipes (if the Kindle were color and had pictures I’d already be an owner of such a device). At $299 the MyDemy seems slightly overpriced considering it appears to only sync with its website Key Ingredient. If I were to really make use of this then I would need to have hundreds of recipes, which I don’t really have. Even if I did, it would take me years to type them all out. Perhaps MyDemy 2.0 will interface with Epicurious and then we’d be good to go.