Published 1 year, 11 months ago
in Personal.
The regular news media has been picking up some stories from HOPE6. One was posted about how two people managed to steal and clone a Verichip. More in the Washington Post here and here.
Also in the news today was an article touting my favorite summer camp ever, CTY, in Slate.
And to remind those of you who haven’t seen it, it is the end of civilization in Queens. More than 25,000 “customers” (where one ‘customer’ could be an apartment complex) have been without power for 7 days! I hope they all sue ConEd when this is over.
The first 8 Saturday’s of my summer have been spent at Polytechnic University’s Melville campus taking CS918: Information Warfare with Professor Cahill. As part of that class I did a paper review on the various aspects of data mining social networks. I’ve posted it here for your enjoyment 
as I try to do with all my interesting work.
I just came back from seeing Superman Returns and it was awesome! Unfortunately, as usual, the people attending ruined it for me. Let’s see what I remember:
- Two different sets of people were talking to eachother 3 rows apart
- Someone held their phone up to the screen to record the Superman theme song so they could use it as a ring tone
- People started laughing at the saddest part of the movie, following by heavy chatter about god knows what
- Near the end someone either took out a Bluetooth headset or a camcorder and held it up to the screen. I know this because there was a blue lighting flashing bright as hell for a good 20 minutes about 8-9 rows in front of me!
- Despite being in the basement, people still managed to answer their cell phones. Thankfully, Cingular didn’t have reception down there so that gives me yet another reason to hate Verizon and Sprint.
So after the movie ended I worked myself up real good, went down to the box office, and raised hell. I told all the bullet points above to the poor girl working the there with my crazy face on and demanded to see a manager. They gave me 2 free tickets to come back.
So now I have another new task in life to be completed upon becoming a multi-millionaire. Start a chain of awesome movie theaters. Here is my initial set of ideas:
- Hand out popcorn and soda at the door, so you dont have to wait in line to get it
- No infants allowed ever
- Throw people out for talking or using their cell phone, no second chances
- Serve beer/have designated nights where it’s 18+ even if the movies are rated lower.
- Allow you to order food from your seat and have it delivered
- Start the movie on time, no “The 20″ bullshit
- Have an in-house lounge (that serves alcohol) where people can go to sit and talk about the movie afterwards. Free Wi-fi of course, so they can blog about how great the experience was :-).
- Have an official forum/aggregation blog for movie-goers to talk in (see the many ____ Planets)
- Allow people to present their ticket stubs to the bartender/waiter to watch parts of the movie again, with full control to pause and rewind it, on the LCD screens in the lounge.
- Something still needs to be worked out for when people go to the bathroom. You don’t want people to miss the movie, but screens in the bathroom is kind of grimy. Instead of having one large set of bathrooms, maybe I should put smaller ones right next to the entrance to each screen?
- Integration with fandango is a must, I might even want to start my own reservation service where you can pick what seats you want and what food should be ready for you. It’s a really simple web service if you think about it.
- Invite experts/celebrities to come and give talks during the day or Q&A sessions after the movie. The NYU Free Culture club did it with Lawrence Lessig, why can’t normal movie theaters do it?
- I also need to think about transportation, how can you make the trip there easier? Partner with a car service!
That’s all I’ve got for now. I think a theater like that could finally beat the competition from downloaded movies, watched in the confines of my own apartment. The profits from the bar/lounge would probably be enough to provide for all the extra stuff in the theater. Part of my ideas could be faciliated with smart card tickets… Movie theaters right now just commoditize everything, they think they’re McDonalds or something. There’s a ton of movie to be made in attracting a higher value moviegoer and charging a premium for it. I mean, with a movie like that, it would be easy to attract the type of people I’d want to give talks.
