McDonald's Is Building a San Francisco Tech Hub
McDonald's, a company known more for hamburgers than coding, is setting up a tech "incubator" in San Francisco's Tenderloin district, an area that's home to countless digital competitors. They have already hired engineers away from PayPal, Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo, and the burger giant wants to expand their technology team even further.
McDonald's is slowly but surely expanding their tech promotions. Last month, they partnered with an e-book company to bring free ebooks to their Happy Meals in England and now, they have started testing digital payments. They are also getting in on World Cup fever with an augmented reality app.
A spokesperson for McDonald’s told TechCrunch:
We want a presence in the heart of the tech community enabling us to attract world-class talent. Being in this epicenter will also help us establish key relationships in the digital space.
In the Tenderloin, McDonalds will be surrounded by Twitter, Square, One Kings Lane and other tech superstars. It's a booming neighborhood which will allow McDonald's tech team to play with the big boys.
It's unclear what the new hires will work on, but considering there will be 20 more engineers, we could see a full-blown digital payment system emerge very soon. Let's see if they pull a Facebook and poach a major PayPal executive sometime soon.
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This article was originally published at http://www.thewire.com/technology/2014/06/mcdonalds-is-building-a-san-francisco-tech-hub/372847/
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