| Skip the Line with GoMobo.com |
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| Written by Maya Parmer | |
| Monday, June 02 2008 | |
Imagine if you never had to spend 15 minutes waiting in line. Noah N Glass was tired of waiting in long lines for his morning cup of joe. Instead of complaining, the budding entrepreneur had a brilliant idea. “My five-minute thought evolved into a big thing.” At 26, Glass is the founder and CEO of MoBo, a service that uses mobile technology (i.e. your cell or Blackberry) to eliminate painful waits in line by pre-ordering coffee, food and maybe someday movie tickets and parking machine meters. Pioneered in New York City in June 2005, MoBo is now in 25 cities nationwide and ever expanding. While the site’s tagline is “Order food on-the-go. Skip the line!” the real attraction is the ever-changing counter on the site, displaying the total time saved by GoMoBo users: 366 days and counting!  To use the system, a customer registers for free at GoMoBo.com, listing his cell number and credit card info. After signing up, customers make a list of their favorite foods at restaurants they frequent (called Faves). These Faves are assigned one digit numbers so that when you’re craving your ham and Swiss on wheat with pickles from Subway, you merely text the one-digit code to MoBo’s five digit code. When MoBo receives the order, it automatically relays it to the restaurant and charges the customer’s credit card. Restaurants pay MoBo 10% of the bill and the customers don’t have to pay anything! The website GoMoBo.com gives restaurants the opportunity to sign themselves up so that customers can start using texting in pre-orders. Glass hopes to get college campuses involved, where tight schedules of texting-addicted students could really take advantage of this new convenience. Glass personally uses the service one to three times a day. “I can’t go back. The only choice is to make this thing available everywhere!”  As a kid, Glass dreamed of being a lawyer but always had an entrepreneurial spirit. He shoveled driveways and did “anything to make a buck” when given the opportunity. He graduated Yale in 2003 with a degree in International Development and Economics, but soon learned he’d prefer to start a business of his own rather than work at a company he didn’t feel passionate about. “I don’t want to be that guy. I want to decide on things, and what to build.” By Maya Parmer Comments
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