AppleCafe and MediaBar
Eight years ago, Tunes.com was offering audio samples for 200,000 songs, as part of its attempt to sell downloadable music over the web. What was Apple doing then? Cybercafes! “The stores also may sell consumer products with Apple logos.” I wonder how that turned out.
I can tell you what happened with the Apple Cafe.
First of all - I planted a seed in John Holtzman’s ear back in 95′ about cyber theme restarants running interactive display terminals at each table. John was running Apple’s licensing efforts and had become famous at Woodstock ‘94 for the Apple logo temporary tatoos.
We had been working on interactive music videos (the MediaBand) and a scalable content project called ‘The Marc Canter Show’.
Because of the lack of broadband infrastructure which was required for most of our ideas at the time, we had come to see location based entertainment and venues as an early entrance path for us into Interactive TV. I had also worked on the Sony Magic project - which became the Metreon and a project for O’Daiba - an island in Tokyo Bay.
So we were unqiuely qualified to dream up and build large scale experiences which would evolve into full-fledged ‘broadband media infrastructures’.
We had started our cyber theme restaurant project - called the MediaBar - in 1996 and already had 25 nodes up and running in my home on Potrero Hill when I opened up the paper to see the announcement for the Apple Cafe.
The only problem is - they forgot to invite us to the announcement.
So Holtzman gets all apologetic - and comes over to see one of his Apple Cafes - already up and running at my home.
As folks logged into the system, their faces was grabbed and resized into convinient sizes for the social networking, multi-player gaming, food and drink ordering and multimedia jukeboxws applications we had built using Director.
A networked based environment enabled groups of people to log onto one station or for end-users to maintain more than one personality.
It was the largest Director app ever built (at the time) with over 250M of graphics, interfaces and rich media desktops. We used Sun machines on our backend and we had a Cisco switch running in my basement.
Anyway - let’s just say that between the digital video servers, Informix blade interfaces, real-time MPEG cards, 10/100 Base-T cards, 250G of storage and admin terminals - it was an outrageous system. Each node on my house had 2 Cat-5, 2 video, 4 audio, 2 phone lines and a DB-9 connector with 20 AMPs of clean power. There were 25 nodes.
This meant I could route full-res video and audio anywhere in my home and provide I.P. connectivity anywhere as well (which was a big deal in 1996.)
So Apple brings over the folks who were licensing the Apple brand and were going to build these Apple Cafes. They owened London’s Planet Hollywood. We were in the Location Based Entertainment white labeling and system integration business - and they were the perfect client to have. By this time it was early ‘97.
But this guy Amelio (or was it Spindler?) just insisted on poo-pooing all over the Apple brand and consistently acted like an idiot. Oh yah, and that guy Satjiv Chahil as well.
At the end of the day - the licensees cancelled the deal, Jobs came back and I went broke.
