Activity
11K followers
-
Justin Foster shared thisRoll call... who here is going to Restaurant Finance Monitor's #RFDC conference in Vegas Nov 9-11? I will be walking the floor and look forward to connecting with you! https://lnkd.in/gyHSxADB
-
Justin Foster shared thisTime for another 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends! Today I sit down with Kevin Nemeth, EVP and Chief Commercial Officer at Church's Texas Chicken, the San Antonio original turning 75 next year and now running more than 1,400 restaurants across 25 countries. Kevin came into the restaurant space from L'Oreal, TD Bank, and HSN, walked into Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in early 2020 with a digital team of three, and left with digital at nearly 20% of sales and five million rewards members. 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 Why Church's splits 50/50 first party vs third party when most of the industry sits at 90/10 👉 The T-Mobile Tuesday blowup that still shapes how he plans every promotion five years later 👉 How Church's tested AI internally and where it's adding the most value for the brand today 👉 Where he's building instead of buying and how he sees that trend evolving over the coming years 👉 His litmus test for whether tech enables hospitality or just hands your work to the guest, and why the kiosk on the counter fails it Shout outs to Qu and Olo for the tech stack love along the way. ➕ PLUS the rapid fire round, where Kevin names the most UNDERRATED tech in restaurants and finishes with "five years from now, the drive-thru is ___" Give it a watch and let me know what you think. Full episode in comments 👇
-
Justin Foster shared thisI wish I was able to stay until the end of Informa Connect Foodservice’s #FSTEC but alas needed to leave this morning for a new customer go-live. This is one of my favorite shows of the entire year (RLC being the other) and this one didn’t disappoint. Marcus Viscidi really does such a great job here. Incept AI received a couple of unexpected and unprompted mentions from the stage which, as a vendor, is the most flattering and effective form of marketing you could ever ask for. I enjoyed connecting with clients, future clients, partners, and industry friends. For us the atmosphere was relaxed and low-key which is always a good mindset to be in. Fun to watch the space evolve and it is 💯 true that the community in this industry is REAL and we’re so happy to have a place building and strengthening that. Huge thanks to Abby Armstrong for her support at this event. Abby and I have been tag-teaming on events for the last year at Incept; we worked together many years ago at Liveclicker and this has been such a fun and awesome reunion as she’s helped us out in a consulting capacity working on The Future of Restaurant Tech dinner tour. We also ran an after hours party this week in Dallas that was a great success. Many thanks to our partners and sponsors at Berry AI Bite Checkmate Craftable Custom Channels Thanx Toast and Virtual Dining Concepts for a fun evening at the conclusion of Day 1! And thank you to Abby for being my booth mate! Headed to Memphis now and looking forward to some good Bar-B-Q!
-
Justin Foster shared thisIt took him a while to come around but Chris Incorvati finally recognized which NFL team is the most superior Informa Connect Foodservice #fstec
-
Justin Foster shared thisCalm before the storm. Waddup, FS/TEC! Thanks for putting on what I’m sure is going to be another killer show Informa Connect Foodservice. I’ll be out here slangin’ some Incept AI. And if you don’t know, “Incept AI takes restaurant orders over the phone and in noisy drive-thrus with friendliness and precision! Learn more at Incept.ai!” 🤣
-
Justin Foster posted thisNot gonna lie, I'm getting pumped up for #fstec next week. This is one of the best events of the year in our space and Informa Connect Foodservice does a fantastic job putting it on. My other favorite show? That would be #RLC. Also an Informa event. #dallasorbust
-
Justin Foster shared this🌴🌞🏄 We're BACK! The Future of Restaurant Tech train is headed to SoCal this October 8!🌴🌞🏄 Some pics below from our last dinner in Costa Mesa. It was a huge hit! If you'd like to come back or give it a try, this is a great opportunity to network with your restaurant exec peers over an exclusive dinner from 6 - 8:30PM at Water Grill restaurant. Format: We start with networking drinks, then explore how technology is shaping our industry over an interactive dinner discussion centered around topics of interest to attendees. Shout-out to our sponsors from Toast Thanx SignalFlare.ai Checkmate and Incept AI for making it happen! Registration requirements and link to register in comments below 👇
-
Justin Foster shared thisHis uncle started as a Papa Johns delivery driver, then bought a single store in East Liverpool with a pile of used equipment. That business is now 275 restaurants across 10 states and they're tracking toward 500 - fast. Today on 🍔Restaurant 🤖Tech 📈Trends I sit down with Eusha Bajwa, leader of technology for the BAJCO GROUP and Founder & CEO of Meal Dynamics. Eusha got tired of watching the back office run on spreadsheets and email, built the fix in-house, and turned it into a product he now sells to other operators. He's a first-time founder and his own toughest customer. 📺WATCH AND LEARN📺 👉 The secret statement his uncle uses to describe how they run 275 stores successfully. 👉 Where franchisees actually have room to move on tech 👉 What really happened when he took his "perfect" all-in-one platform to his own ops teams 👉 His answer on whether AI is shrinking his dev team. ➕ PLUS rapid fire! the garlic-sauce hack you'll want to try on your next order, the most OVERRATED restaurant tech, and the perfect four-word answer to "the back office should feel like ___" Give it a watch and let me know what you think 👇
-
Justin Foster liked thisJustin Foster liked thisThis founder dances on his product at every trade show. The product is a 4K touchscreen restaurant table, and 80 million guests have already used it. I caught Dmytro Kostyk doing exactly that at Hospitality Tech Expo in London. He and Antonia Tuccii are fellow Ukrainian founders, and their booth was hard to miss. At first it looks like a stunt, but it's actually the whole pitch. Restaurants are brutal for hardware. Spills, hot plates, kids, cutlery, 14-hour shifts. Yet Dmytro's tables have been running for years across 16 countries, in airports, cafes, cruise ships and retail flagships. He built them from scratch in Kyiv. The software, the hardware, even his own chip to control the table. In hospitality, the hardest feature to build isn't AI or a beautiful interface. It's surviving a Friday night. And once a table survives, Dmytro calls it a money-making machine. Guests already spend a big chunk of their time staring at their phones. So why not bring that attention back to the restaurant's own screen, and turn it into upsells, reorders, games, photos and more, while making the experience genuinely engaging? Everyone is building AI for restaurants. But restaurants still run on tables, counters and shelves. Building for that physical layer is much harder, and that's exactly why so much value is still hiding there. Which part of the restaurant do you think needs to get smart next?
-
Justin Foster reacted on thisJustin Foster reacted on this𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘴 𝘨𝘦𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘪𝘤𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘴𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘸𝘰𝘳𝘬 𝘩𝘢𝘱𝘱𝘦𝘯𝘴: 𝘪𝘯 𝘰𝘶𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘶𝘳𝘢𝘯𝘵𝘴! I recently had the privilege of visiting our company owned Applebee's Neighborhood Grill + Bar teams in the Virginia market. This trip was a powerful reminder of the impact our technology has on our operators and, ultimately, our guests. Our primary goal is simple: 𝗿𝗲𝗱𝘂𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗿𝗶𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺𝘀 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗲𝗹𝗲𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗴𝘂𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲. Getting first-hand feedback from the front lines is invaluable for ensuring we’re building and refining the right tools. While every leader I met with was incredible, I want to extend a huge thank you Terry, the General Manager at 5750 Virginia Beach Blvd location in Norfolk. Terry is a lifelong team member AND he’s truly a fellow technologist. His insights were sharp, operational and focused on empowering his people. Thank you, Terry, for your candid feedback and your leadership. None of this innovation moves from idea to execution without an extraordinary team. Shout-out to Adnan Rahman, Daniel Stephan, and the entire boots on the ground technology team for their relentless drive, operational empathy, and dedication to installing technology that genuinely empower our teams. Exciting things are ahead as we continue to make hospitality easier, faster, and better for everyone under our roof. 🍎✨ #RestaurantTech #Applebees #HospitalityLeadership #GuestExperience #FieldVisits #TeamCelebration #GeneralManager #Leadership #DineBrands
-
Justin Foster reacted on thisDid a thing w/Justin Foster on his Restaurant Tech Trends Podcast and had a blast talking about my path to Church's Texas Chicken, Marketing Tech and where trends are taking the restaurant industry. Much thanks, Justin!
-
Justin Foster reacted on thisJustin Foster reacted on thisThis is the new Industrial Revolution is upon us. Except it’s the Super Intelligence ("SI") Revolution. SI factories (aka Data Centers) are the industrial plants and power generation is the oil. The end product is low cost intelligence on steroids. The SI build-out is becoming the biggest economic bet in U.S. history. Brookings estimates $10.3 trillion in data centers and related infrastructure from 2025 to 2032 — about 3.6% of GDP a year. That dwarfs the railroads, the interstate highways, and the plumbing of the internet combined. The chart below shows the massive buildout by the hyper scalers which was $300 billion in 2024 and will exceed $1 trillion next year. This is the new economy. Construction, power, chips, steel, transformers, and manual labor creating software the likes of which we’ve never seen. The build out is generating growth while the people saying “slow down” or “stop” pretend that’s remotely feasible. You do not “pause” on the largest infrastructure wave in American history and then magically keep the jobs, the grid upgrades, and the productivity. We know that China is trying to sow as much anxiety in us as possible to slow us down. Not happening. Yesterday, President Trump signed with the Super Intelligence leaders, Elon, Jensen, Zuck, Sundar, Brockman, Amodei and others, a White House Accord on Super Intelligence. Put in the guardrails and just keep building. It looked like a modern day Declaration of Independence. The Doomers will eventually splinter. The cynical decarbonizers are transitioning into SI data-center clean power generation. The true believers will mix anti-data center views with heavy doses of socialism and anti-Israel tropes. They will eventually be drowned out by voices of reason. And real economic progress. The US is ready to capitalize on this new Super Intelligence Revolution. Steel in the ground. Power generation in space. Super Intelligence at American scale. Oh and we are accepting the rebranding and now calling DealGround an "SI-native" CRE data platform. 😃
Experience & Education
Patents
-
Video in e-mail
Issued US 8878855
To allow a video clip to be rendered within an e-mail, the video stream is converted into an animated image object (e.g. a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) object) and stored on a server system. An HTML image element/tag (<img . . . >) is created that references the animated image object at the server, for embedding in a conventional HTML-encoded e-mail message. When the receiving e-mail application processes the HTML encoding, the processing of the HTML image element causes the…
To allow a video clip to be rendered within an e-mail, the video stream is converted into an animated image object (e.g. a GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) object) and stored on a server system. An HTML image element/tag (<img . . . >) is created that references the animated image object at the server, for embedding in a conventional HTML-encoded e-mail message. When the receiving e-mail application processes the HTML encoding, the processing of the HTML image element causes the referenced animated image object to be downloaded and displayed, thereby automatically presenting a recreation of the video stream. To facilitate efficient transmission to the receiving device, the size of the animated image object is preferably optimized before transmission, the optimization including general optimization techniques, as well as optimizations based on the particular characteristics associated with the receiving device and/or the communications link to the receiving device.
Other inventorsSee patent
Languages
-
Mandarin (Chinese)
-
-
English
Native or bilingual proficiency
Recommendations received
5 people have recommended Justin
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
-
Noah Heldman
Is SaaS dead, or at least dying quickly? Ben Griswold and I explore this question in detail in our latest podcast. From positioning build vs. buy as a continuum rather than as a binary choice, to the potential created by rapid AI builds, we consider the evolution and future of SaaS. Apple: https://lnkd.in/eKKnB6Ae Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eezEuH35 YouTube: https://lnkd.in/ep8si5qP
-
Julie Brinkman
If you feel like the STR industry is moving faster than guests with the option for an early check-in, you’re not wrong. Here’s the major headlines your google alerts didn't send you. (source links in comments) 🔴 With Sonder’s bankruptcy making headlines, Marriott is now alleging that the company put guest safety at risk while seeking financial support, leading to a swift end to their partnership amid a chaotic wind-down. (source: Business Insider) 🤝 Beyond and Boom and have joined forces to create an AI-powered, fully connected ecosystem that brings intelligent automation, real-time data, and dynamic pricing together to redefine the future of property management and revenue growth. (source: Beyond) ⛳ East Lothian is considering temporary short-term rental licenses during major events like the Genesis Scottish Open, a move designed to boost accommodation supply and support visitor demand during peak periods. (source: Golfweek) ⚽ And in Kansas City, a similar proposal is taking shape: the city is weighing a temporary STR permit (just $50) for the 2026 World Cup (and other major local events - read: when TSwift watches the Chiefs play) to help residents participate economically and meet the surge in lodging demand. Check it out Lindsey Branding (source: The Kansas City Star) 🏘️ Airbnb reported a record-breaking Q3 with $4.1B in revenue and $1.4B in profit, alongside major updates for hosts, including “Reserve Now, Pay Later,” expanded AI tools, 65 product improvements, and a pilot program for hotel listings in key cities. (source: The Host Report) 📸 Vrbo now lets guests upload their own photos (appearing in reviews, main galleries, and AI review summaries), adding more transparency and real-world context to the booking experience. (source: Skift) 🇬🇧 Airbnb has launched a £1 million “Best of British” fund, backed by VisitBritain, offering grants of up to £100,000 to help communities turn local traditions into cultural experiences and attract more evenly distributed tourism across the UK. (source: ShortTermRentalz) #shorttermrentals #vacationrentals
5 Comments
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top contentOthers named Justin Foster in United States
480 others named Justin Foster in United States are on LinkedIn
See others named Justin Foster