uWink is Restaurant 2.0

While at my local Barnes & Noble looking for a new book on Web Analytics I started socializing with this guy standing next to me. I was complaining how all of Barnes & Nobles selection of Internet books comprised of eBay & Google how-to books.

It turned out that the guy who I was talking with was Brent Bushnell, Lead Developer for a new restaurant in beta called uWink. It’s started by former CEO of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese, Nolan Bushnell.

He was telling me about all these new Apple applications he was writing for the restaurant and went into explaining how uWink is a new concept restaurant that had just launched two months ago. As it turned out, uWink was just right upstairs from the book store.

I decided to check out this new concept restaurant and the only way to really explain it is it is like Web 2.0 for restaurants. The atmosphere is super social, where every where you look flat panel LCD screens draw you in. I decided to sit at the bar, order an ice tea and see if I could break things. (Not really, but I was pushing a lot of buttons.)

There are no waiters, only runners. At each table and at each bar stool resides an interactive panel display where you can order your foods, order alcohol or setup a socialized event with the cute chicks sitting at the end of the bar.

As I sat there playing with the panel, listening to the music and watching the socialness of everyone, I was really taken back by this place. It was not like any other restaurant I have ever been in. It is especially nothing like Dave & Busters, the video arcade and over hyped restaurant for adults. This place had a unique feel to it, much like many of the new social web 2.0 websites that are now appearing on the web.

I sat down for a few minutes and started to talk with Brent. Brent was working away on his laptop along side several other programmers on a side table right next to many of the customers. They were right there in the mix of things, creating new applications to entertain the customers. There were apple laptops, headphones and iPods. The walls were displaying tagged images from Flickr and there was this cool beat in the room.

Brent was telling me all about the neat things they had planned with the whole social restaurant experience and I could not help but think this is something that could be big. As I looked around the room I noticed how packed it was for a restaurant that has only open for two months. Brent told me most of this foot traffic was from plane old social networking.

As it turns out uWink Inc. (UWNK.OB) is a publicly traded company with the price of its stock last trading at $2.22 and with a market cap of $55m Just last summer the stock was trading at around $0.40. Currently uWink has only one restaurant and that is in Los Angeles but they have really big plans to franchise.

Did you read my blog post on telling a good story? Well, this is one restaurant that is telling an exciting new good story. Brent had no idea who I was but just the way he was talking about the restaurant back in the book store made me want to see it for myself. When I did, I was really blown away. Check out their blog!

By the way Brent, if you need help driving organic search engine traffic to your blogs and website, contact me!

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 6th, 2007 at 7:29 pm and is filed under Shandy Tips, Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.