Outsourcing was the topic of conversation with my family when I was in the US. I had an interesting discussion with my father about Thomas Friedman's new book The World is Flat. Friedman talks about globalization and how the world is changing and how you need to adapt. Reading through it now. Very interesting read. One of the central topics is outsourcing. My father brought up an interesting buinsess idea of outsourcing the reservations of a restaurant. Since then I've been thinking non-stop about it. Just had the time to scan the web to see if it was already done. I was impressed to see two companies had already worked the idea and fused it with the web, Opentable and Dinner Broker. Opentable seems to do the best and most thorough job capturing most of the elements that I thought about - large US coverage, top restaurants in an area, links into restaurant reviews, maps, ability to book on-line and discounts when you book through them. They actually don't outsource the actual reservations but supply reservation software to the restaurant and then hook into it from the web, which flattens the world by putting reservations directly in the hands of the user. It would be a killer service if users could rate the restaurants and they could generate a top 10 list from that. The top 10 list they show for each city is simply the most booked and says nothing about the experience. Also, I would really love to see some kind of mobile proximity service - I'm at the Apple Store in Soho, tell me the top 5 rated sushi places within 5 blocks. That would be cool.