Last year in November, we featured the PiePal, which is a nifty button which when pushed orders your favorite Domino's pizza to your doorstop, on our blog.

Sounds like fun, right?

Just wait until it hits the market. I already can't wait to use it.

Well, PiePal is a brainchild of the folks at iStrategyLabs which is a design agency based in Washington, DC and is a 3D printed button and LEDs put together. When connected to the internet via WiFi and pushed it helps you order pizza. You can also select the number of pizzas you want to order by turning the dial and once your order has been confirmed the LEDs light up.

I know the idea sounds ridiculous but imagine how easy our lives would be if we had such a product, ordering pizza with a push of a button. Yay!

Anyways, as of now PiePal is just a prototype and the company is planning to roll it into the market in sometime. According to the PiePal website, "PiePal is a real product in development by the fine folks at iStrategyLabs in Washington, DC."

To know more about PiePal, we got in touch with the CEO Peter Corbett of the iStrategyLabs and here what he has to say about PiePal:
Happy reading!

1. Hi Peter, please introduce yourself and iStrategyLabs to our readers.

My name is Peter Corbett and I'm the CEO of iStrategyLabs. I started iStrategyLabs about six years ago to focus on the intersection of online and offline that means we build web, mobile and physical technology that enables people to interact, usually with a brand in real-time in the real world or around the web or phone, something like that or the 'GE Social Fridge', we created which is a fridge that takes ten Foursquare check-ins to unlock, so you can get the free beer and soda inside of the 'Spongebob Skill Crane' for Nickelodeon or the 'PiePal' which some of you have seen recently as well.


iStrategyLabs isn't an idea. It really, I think it's a capability. We are a company of thirty five people now, started out with really just me for the first year doing design and development for brands and today, we certainly do that work but we are also always thinking about how we can change the way people interact with the real world and that's what you are seeing in some of the social machine work we do whether it's the 'Social Fridge', the 'Skill Crane', the 'PiePal' or a few other things.

3. What is 'PiePal'? What inspired you to work on it? Was it a personal experience that led to its inception?

PiePal is just a simple button that when you push it pizza shows up at your house or office.

We built that just for fun, we are always prototyping so we wanted to prototype a device that made it incredibly easy for consumers to do a specific action, in this case, get a pizza to them.

We use the Domino's online ordering system because it's really easy to use. It has a five step ordering process and we turned it into a one step process so the people sort of really liked that. Almost sixty thousand people viewed the video, thirty to forty thousand people visited the micro site and thirty thousand people signed up to be a 'Beta Taster'. It was also covered on Fox news, CNET, NPR and a lot of places.


We use a few things like the Arduino and Raspberry Pi, both of which are micro-controllers and do different things. One of the micro-controllers, specifically operates all the LED lights, the 'slick' button pushing and the ordering part of it. The software that goes into that is certainly little bit of C++ but also a whole bunch of JavaScript so we do a lot of PhantomJS and Node.js development for the stuff. Phantom JS allows us to stimulate the ordering process online at the push of a button.



We didn't team up with Domino's, it's not an official relationship at all. We just use their ordering system for the reason I gave you which is that it's a really good online system and we needed a good ordering system to do that.


The 'Beta Taster' program is really now just an early look at what we are doing and so we are going to be asking our 'Beta Taster' questions like "What would you use this for?", "How should you pay for it?" and "What are the other features you think would be interesting?"

Perks of that are being able to play with emerging technology that you think is interesting.

7. How do you plan to promote 'Piepal'? What do you think is the ideal mix of social, online and offline promotion? What about word-of-mouth promotion?

We have already done it, right! We posted it to our blog and we got the word out on Twitter and Facebook through the iStrategyLabs followerships and in about a week fifty thousand people watched the video, twenty something thousand people visited the site and thousands signed up, so we are very much of a word-of-mouth agency. We think about how will people perceive this, why will they talk about it; we have built this so that it's easier for them to talk about. So that's the plan and that was the plan and still is the plan.

8. 'Piepal' has received appreciation by the people. How does it feel? What is the biggest compliment that you have received for designing 'Piepal'?

It feels good to have your idea get validated by thousands of people. I think the funniest things are the most fulfilling thing that we saw in terms of appreciation or people just saying "Take my money please." Like this expression "Oh my God, this is so amazing. Just vacuum the dollars out of my bank account, I want this thing so bad" that's really great to see. I also love people saying that this is the most important technology innovation of all-time. Obviously, that's an exaggeration but it's fun to see the kind of passion behind that.

9. When do we get to see 'Piepal' in the market?

It's a great question but honestly speaking, I don't know it yet.

We have an internal 'Accelerator Process' that the company is going through, here at iStrategyLabs and over the course of the next year, we are going to invest about almost a million dollars in product development and PiePal is in the running as a potential product that we would really take to the market at a large scale but we have other ideas and prototypes that may be more interesting. So I don't know what is the answer to the question but we should know by Spring, I think.

10. What is the fondest memory that you and your team has of the process of conceiving 'Piepal' to having it up and running?

The fondest memory is always to have launched. To be honest, I don't know about the conceptualization phase but initially, it was called the "Pizza Bot" and I think that the renaming of it to 'PiePal' made people really excited; it felt more right than "Pizza Bot".

11. You work with so many social projects. How do you select the projects you work on?

We try to do things that are interesting and things that have not been done before. We try to work on things that our client hopefully, is a nice human being or a group of human beings with a great company and so that helps us in selecting the right project to work on.

12. Name some of the biggest brands you have partnered with in the industry to collaborate on projects.

We have had clients like Disney, ESPN, ABC, NPR Microsoft, NASDAQ, Intel, GEICO, Volkswagen, Nickelodeon, Hilton, Doubletree, Embassy Suites, Coco Cola and bunch of others.

13. What are your future plans at iStrategylabs? Are you guys working on any cool projects?

I mentioned the Accelerator Process, I think that's the big thing right now. We are also working on a lot of client projects as well.

The Accelerator should generate a really interesting new product that will take to the market in the Fall. I don't know what that is yet, we will find out over the next few months as we go through our process.

14. What future advice would you like to give to a budding and aspiring design company?

We follow one very big rule which is that if we do great work then everything else will follow. And I think that's the most important thing to follow if you are a design driven company. We have really seen it so we stay focused on delivering high quality work whether it is for our clients or for ourselves and that's proven to be a great model.

The other thing I would say is that you are who you are, as much as what you say yes to is what you say no to, we just make sure that we say no to enough things all the time and those things could be big projects with big companies but they just not be that interesting so we'll have enough time today to work on interesting things.

Peter, thanks for such an extensive interview. It was a great experience learning about you. Wish you good luck!

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