Nolan Bushnell (the visionary founder of Atari and Chuck E Cheese) is developing a new restaurant concept. The uWink Media Bistros will offer touch screen ordering via uWink Media Consuls, and while you wait for the food to be delivered, you can play proprietary uWink games. The first restaurant will be opened in Los Angeles within a few months, and Nolan hopes to have rapid growth via company owned restaurants and franchising. A former CPK and Koo Koo Roo executive, John Kaufman, is Director of Restaurant Operations.

If you believe in the concept, the timing is ripe to buy uWink stock which is currently trading around .36 cents. I think people want to eat and talk with friends and family at restaurants, and not play computer games, but I definitely would not short the stock and bet against Nolan. And, I think the concept would be a hit in Asia.

Not only is Nolan truly a visionary, he is an incredibly generous person. In 2002, when I launched an online game company, playENGINE>, I called him (with no introduction) to request a meeting, and he spent two hours with me.

(Touch screens for ordering at fast food restaurants seems to make a lot of sense, by the way. McDonald’s has piloted the concept in several restaurants.)

[Update: uWink has chosen the location for the first Media Bistro: Westfield Promenade in Woodland Hills, and will open in summer 2006.]

Companies are increasingly depending on consumers to generate innovative ideas, a trend which is enabled by technology, and something I will be talking about more. I have on my “to read” list Eric von Hippel’s book – Democratizing Innovation.

Kettle Chips is hosting its second annual new flavor competition online now. The company solicited new flavor ideas from consumers, and developed five flavors that were deemed to have market potential: Buffalo Bleu Cheese, Dirty Martini, Tuscan Three Cheese, Spicy Mary, and Creamy Caesar. Consumers are encouraged to order samples of the five flavors (only a limited quantity are available), and vote for their favorite. The winning chip flavor will be produced this year!

I have a fascination with China. I’ve spent time in Shanghai, and I admire China’s amazing economic growth, history, people and culture. Be on the lookout for innovation profiles, news, thoughts and ideas from China. I’m especially expecting great things from Shak Khan, a veteran technology entrepreneur living in Shanghai and chasing the “Chinese dream.”

It is clear that China has emerged in recent years as a manufacturing force, and a huge innovation in manufacturing sourcing efficiency has been the development of Alibaba and Global Sources, which are owned partly by Yahoo! and eBay respectively.

When I was in Shanghai last year, Shanghai based Jeff MacCorkle and I discussed the potential of eBay as a retailer of Chinese manufactured products. He mentioned an article I haven’t been able to find about an entrepreneur who was wandering around the famous Canton Trade Show, and discovered a room of billiard tables available at a fraction of the cost of billiard tables manufactured in the States. He reserved a shipping container, filled it up with pool tables and sold them on eBay. Allegedly, this guy is now the number 1 eBay retailer for pool tables and makes caboodles of money.

As Jeff says, there is opportunity for eBay entrepreneurs who figure out an efficient method to source, quality check, and ship Chinese manufactured products (especially products that aren’t already sourced in China by Wal-Mart - pool tables, or motorized, drivable toy cars, for example).

Levi Strauss announced yesterday that the company is introducing RedWire DLX jeans in the fall of 2006, which will have an iPod dock built into a side pocket and a joystick control on the outside. Another innovative feature will be an integrated retractable headphone device, so wires won’t get tangled.

[Thanks, MacDailyNews]

Several university, private industry, and government groups are developing an innovative approach to accessing the inner solar system via robotic elevator cars that move up and down a ribbon, which is anchored to earth, and a small man-made counterweight in space. The elevator would potentially carry satellites, solar power systems, exploration probes, factories, and eventually people into space.

In October, there was a space elevator competition at Moffit Field in Silicon Valley. The competition was run by the Spaceward Foundation, a non-profit group, and had a $50,000 prize money furnished by NASA. No group won, and the preliminary elevator technology is believed to be at least two years off.

According to Siliconbeat, there have also been secretive demonstrations of a Space Elevator project by the Foresight Nanotech Institute. The project apparently also involves Liftport Group, which has received a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to use airspace to conduct preliminary tests.

Liftport has a launch date set: April 12, 2018.

[Thanks, Liftport Group, Siliconbeat, San Jose Mercury News]

[Update: The March 1, 2006 issue of Business2.0 Magazine has an excellent and detailed description of the space elevator concept.]

Especially for my parents and other “non-techies” out there who may not yet be in the know, RSS is an Internet technology innovation that automatically syndicates content from websites and weblogs. RSS feeds are delivered to an aggregator (or viewer) such as my.yahoo.com, bloglines.com, pluck.com, or newsgator.com. For beginners, my.yahoo.com features an intuitive interface and quality RSS feed search function, so you can add feeds from news sources (e.g. New York Times and Forbes), and blogs (e.g. SHARKRIDE and TechCrunch).

My favorite viewer is Newsgator because of its clean design, speed, and great functionality for deleting posts as you read, so current, unread posts are only displayed. Go register for an aggregator now. Then return and follow the orange feed button up top, select your aggregator, and you will automatically receive content updates as I post!

Welcome to the new web!

I’d first like to thank Michael Arrington of TechCrunch fame for unwittingly inspiring me to start SHARKRIDE. Michael is one of the most influential people in the world of Web 2.0, and I hope to meet him at some point in the near future. Maybe I’ll crash one of his legendary parties!

I really thought a lot about what to name SHARKRIDE. As Internet veterans know, naming is a challenge, given the crowdedness (should be a word, if it’s not) of domain real estate. A shark ride represents an innovative concept, and I imagine riding a shark would be adventurous and fun, which I anticipate this will be.

Thanks for reading, and I welcome (and hope for) your contributions to the discussion via comments to posts or email!