OLA Cafe and Data driven innovation

A few weeks ago, I got an email from Ola Cabs (for the record, I have used their service in the past) about their new product called Ola Cafe.  As the name suggests, it is a food delivery service that operates in four Indian cities namely Bangalore, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi and select locations.  When I look at this idea, it is a fantastic innovation (Uber has a similar service in the US). The food delivery market with apps like Tiny Owl and Foodpanda are growing more than 40% YOY but in my view Ola as a business entity is sitting on a gold mine of data.  They have access to a customer's profile, his home location, spending capacity and with the use of GPS, you already have a system in place.  In my view the biggest advantage such players have is the aggregation of data and an opportunity for different data points to talk to one another. This is a challenge in most service industries in India.  The ability to piggy back on an existing service and use data to drive innovation will differentiate the Ola business from the other food delivery brands.  Data is now no longer linear and with disparate amounts of data or Big data being generated and uses of Hadoop like tools will definitely see a new world emerging. Till then one will eagerly wait the next steps especially execution, where aggregators in India face immense challenges.