Instacart: Crowdsourcing Your Grocery Shopping

I don't understand this at all and would really appreciate any enlightenment.

What has changed in technology in the past 12 years to enable home grocery delivery? Broadband? Cloud storage? HTML5? AJAX? Flat design? Mobile? And if any of these (Mobile being the most likely), how would they affect viability?

I suspect the thing that has changed more is us. We are probably more open to "low tech" evolutions: lack of privacy, increased trust of strangers, crowd sourcing, always being connected. Or maybe some clever hackers figured out a better way of doing something new with the same basic technology.

Frankly, I can't imagine what these 10 programmers would be doing today that couldn't have been done in 2001.

One important advantage instacart has over the in-store experience is the filtering and sorting of goods. The amount of toilet paper or cereal to choose from is absurd.

EDIT: After looking at the web app there appears to be no sorting/filtering capabilities but only search. Bummer.

-- For the user, it's easier than ever to place an order. Internet connection speeds are fast, smartphones have snappy native apps, 3G is everywhere -- so you can order groceries on the ride home. You can quickly download 100 images of products on the bus ride home and pick the ones you want (for example).

-- For Instacart, processing those orders at scale is also easier than ever. EC2 instances are cheap and easily provisioned, payment processing is easier thanks to a bevy of services, and online use of credit cards doesn't have the riskiness and stigma associated with it in the 90s.

-- For the shopper going out to buy groceries, communication is easier than the 90s. With broadband and smartphones, they can send updates back to Instacart servers faster and have them processed automatically (as opposed to the 90s, where a cellphone call would have information transmitted by voice, which would have to be processed by a human). Smartphones alone enable a larger volume of information to be communicated back to Instacart, and have it be as simple as the shopper checking off items purchased or scratching off items not available.

-- For Instacart again, dynamic routing, inventory updates, and scheduling are much easier (in theory) because of the timely updates from shoppers, as well as the enormous amount of computing power available. Couple that with GPS tracking and you enable some sort of accountability for the shoppers, as well as a better customer experience for the user ("your shopper is 3 minutes away, on Van Ness...")

It's similar to how UPS revolutionized package shipping with point-by-point delivery updates.

That said, as a former Instacart patron, I feel Instacart has a long way to go before it's as entrenched as Amazon.