{Disarmed} The story of CyberSlice, the first great online pizzeria that was inspired by Sandra Bullock and even Steve Jobs promoted

In 1995 ordering pizzas on the internet was almost unimaginable , but since it (almost) did not exist in real life, someone thought it would be good to anticipate the future and show what something like that would be like in a movie.

That is precisely what happens in the first minutes in the movie 'The network'. Sandra Bullock appears ordering a pizza online and that, which was a seemingly unimportant detail, ended up being the germ of a company called CyberSlice that tried to bring the online pizza business to reality. By the way: even Steve Jobs himself was in the scourge.

Hey, maybe the online pizzas is an idea

Pizza Hut had done a little experiment in 1994 : They created PizzaNet and tried to convince the world that ordering pizzas online made sense. It was too early : they barely managed to sell 10 pizzas a week, but that must have permeated the scriptwriters of the movie 'La red', which was released a year later.

At the beginning of the film Sandra Bullock appears playing a game of 'Wolfenstein 3D' on her PowerMac 8100/80 (a machine at that time), and soon she goes to the PC with Windows 3.1 that was next to it and, wonder of wonders , there you have the imaginary website page of Pizza.Net (well, more or less, the browser used does not seem real).

In xiaomist.com From investing in startups to investing in "star" chefs: this is how some funds seek to revolutionize food delivery at home

Sandra orders her pizza, which costs $ 14 without tip (25 years later the price has barely changed, funny) and goes on with her life, which becomes quite complicated during the course of the film. So far everything seemed normal, right?

No.

An entrepreneur named Tim Glass saw the movie and didn't care too much about everything that happened after the pizza thing. He stuck with that, and actually began to obsess over one idea: that ordering pizza online was the future . He found that no one had exploited that option - Pizza Hut was more of a symbolic gesture than anything else - so he got down to work, and in 1996 he created a company called CyberSlice .

Bryan Cupps and Tim Glass

He and his partner Bryan Cupps got down to business. To begin with, they registered the patent to be able to order products through the internet (that's nothing) and soon they began to develop all the technology that would make it possible to turn this business into something real . Your promotional report ( PDF ) is wonderful.

When Jobs promoted not iPods, but online pizzerias

They did it with important limitations: Google Maps did not exist, and they teamed up with MapQuest for the part that worked with customer addresses. Much more important was its alliance with NeXT , the company created by Steve Jobs that developed the WebObjects technology used in CyberSlice.

That business alliance was so unique that Steve Jobs even touted CyberSlice in a press release commenting how "NeXT is pleased to provide the necessary technology for CyberSlice, combining fun with an innovative business concept."

In xiaomist.com This is how Microsoft lost its first battle against Steve Jobs and the legendary NeXT: a former executive tells it from the inside

The thing went even further: Steve Jobs was the first customer of CyberSlice , and was in charge of placing the first order of an online pizza through its website during a press conference in Redwood City, California. By the way: Apple bought NeXT 17 days after that press release.

The pizzerias didn't even need internet access or a computer - customers ordered the pizzas through the CyberSlice website, and that triggered an automated phone call to the pizzeria in which a robotic voice dictated the order to the employee .

That generated a lot of interest in a company that faced an enormous number of technical problems, and also problems of convenience : In a 1998 article, CNN reminded its readers that "after all, few things are as simple as calling the local pizzeria or Chinese restaurant "for food delivery.

Online pizzerias were big business, but not yet back then

In fact in CyberSlice they tried to go all out the wrong way. $ 54 million was spent on advertising on the four major portals of the time in a four-year period. The problem is not that it was a lot of money (which it was), but that online advertising was not especially good at that time, and it appeared on sites that CyberSlice did not even serve.

The company began a unique and bizarre journey that transformed it over and over again. It was renamed CyberMeals - the pizzas weren't enough - and it tried to expand its business and burn money in the process. In 1998 several companies invested 10 million dollars and I ended up being led by a former Disney executive named Rich Frank.

In xiaomist.com When Mosaic ruled the world (of browsers)

At the beginning of 1999 CyberMelas became Food.com and from that moment on its strategy was much more transversal. For two decades it managed to work with some success, but the truth is that the original idea of ​​the online pizzeria would end up being much more exploited by other companies . Let's not say the restoration in general.

But that, of course, is another story. One that ultimately started (a bit) with a Sandra Bullock movie whose blunders in the technological field were gutted by enthusiasts who made her fall off a donkey quite a bit.

-
The news The story of CyberSlice, the first great online pizzeria that was inspired by Sandra Bullock and that even Steve Jobs promoted was originally published in xiaomist.com by Javier Pastor .