Exhausted of waiting for the waiter to bring the check, and unsure of what to do when he finally comes and one person has to figure out how to split the bill fairly? Well… Cover, might be the solution to all these awkward situations!

Launched just last month in New York City, Cover is a free mobile application available on App Store and sooner on Android. This app will enable its users to check- in at one of the participating restaurants, and when it’s time for the check, Cover will automatically pay as long as the customer registered his/her credit card![1]

However, this makes me wonder. What happens when I don’t register my credit card, wait for the waiter to be submerged into his work and walk out of the restaurant without paying? Are restaurants going to put up measures of RIFD or Cover will develop special tracking system? Time will tell…

To proceed with, another cool and risky characteristic of this new app, is equal payment. If you go to a restaurant with a group of friends or family, and the check time comes, cover will split the bill evenly among all the participants registered on your table.

While this address the uncomfortable situations of figuring out who ate what and how much they are supposed to pay, this new specialization however does not help or give much credit to the app in the case where one person decides to order an extra Domaine Romanée-Conti and another does not, and at the end of the day we all have to pay the same amount. This scenario goes against the whole value proposition of “even payment” that the company is trying to sell to its customers. The end result of this is that, customers won’t be satisfied by the App services and sales of the company will diminish, hence no profit.

Nevertheless, even though Cover has quite some flaws, it  still remains one of the Business Technology Management that will help restaurants to leverage new opportunities, redesign their business model and minimize the risks associated with bookkeeping mistakes, server’s distractions when receiving payments, and most important, customer vendetta when the server did not bring the bill on time.

I would like to leave you with a small thought. Do you think that by eliminating the middle- man between our check books and the exist door will create and aggravate the distance that technology has already established between and within individuals?