Saturday, October 25, 2008

Laughing Planet

@ Laughing Planet

In offering to spike your caffeinated beverage with some Jack Daniels, we're not muscling in on liquor bar turf so directly, as the ambiance involves staying, or at least looking, pretty sharp, in business clothes, basically conducting small board meetings, using the LCD for either PowerPoints (generic) or real time hookups with partners in this / other time zones.

Sports bars involve sharing one screen to a whole room, whereas a coffee bar distributes content through multiple screens, each potentially hosting different programming, like those old juke boxes, one per booth.

However, for a host of reasons, Portland might not be the best city for prototyping, even if some of the thinking is coming from Pauling House Campus and environs (Richmond / Sunnyside).

We could develop streaming content locally, asynchronously served (or synchronously even), per our ToonTown economy, yet clue "first viewers" closer to Hollywood. That's an equation involving state statutes, political climate, other factors.

"Good thing we have 50 states" is what I'm thinking.

Of course the franchise idea occurred to both Nirel & myself (we think alike in some ways), and also the possibility of occupying different tiers, in terms of family friendly, versus no minors allowed.

The idea of an NC-17 McDonalds may be counter-intuitive (to call up a known franchise i.e. chain), but one might imagine gradations in service nonetheless, as in Orlando.

In a parallel meeting with Patrick, we resolved to trademark some stuff around our HAARP beer concept, a play on the Irish brand, "affordable mind control: inexpensive, not cheap". We might have one of those HAARP cams play a part in commercials.

Yes, we're into spoofing those many urban legends, have some DIA grays on the consulting team, just to keep it real.