Once upon a time, I was working at Snaplogic, and at that time its office was in downtown San Mateo. Pretty much across the street from a great coffee shop, Kaffeehaus.

If you’ve been there, or even if you just looked at the website, you’d realize that the owner put quite an effort into it being a Viennese-style coffee house, with all the interior design decisions that go with it.

Now, a local coffee shop is often a place where people expect to post some local notices and ads (“lost dog”, “handyman available”, “local church choir concert”, etc). And here’s a conundrum. A simple cork bulletin board with a bunch of papers pinned to it just did not seem to fit the overall mood/interior/decor of the cafe:

Yet the cafe does want to serve local community and become an institution.

This being Silicon Valley, Val, the Kaffeehaus owner, had a vision — what about a virtual board, as a touch-screen.

The name was quickly chosen to be Wildboard — because it is, well, a bulletin board and in honor of the boar’s head that is prominently featured on the wall:

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A multi-touch-based virtual bulletin board sounded interesting. Most touch-screen kiosks I’ve seen so far — in hotels and malls, for instance, or things like ImageSurge — only allow tap, not true multi-touch. (To be honest, multi-touch may or may not be useful — but see below and see also P.S. — but it is a very nice “pizzazz”).

And we — that is, myself and Vio — got to work. And in short order we had:

• Fully multi-touch (with rotation, zoom, etc) web UI — as a Windows 8 CSS/Javascript app (source).
• Wildboard “board server” — a Python app running on the same computer as the UI. It is responsible for polling the web server (below) and serving information to the UI (source).
• Wildboard web server — a PHP app based on an existing web classified application(source). This allows users to submit ads (or they can do it via a mobile app, as below). It is also modified to automatically create QR codes based on user-provided information (map, contact, calendar, etc) and adds them to an ad.
• Wildboard mobile app — PhoneGap/Cordova based app for both Android and iPhone (source)
  This app allows one to:
  • Post an ad
  • Scan an ad’s QR code
  • And, finally, for the “Wow!” effect during the demo, one can drag an ad from the screen into the phone. Here it is, in action:
    
• Wildboard orchestrator — a Node.js app (source) designed to coordinate interactions between the mobile app and the board. It is the one that is determines which mobile app is near which board and orchestrates the fancy “drag” operation shown above.
• For more information, check out spec and the writeup.

Charismatic Val somehow managed to get a big touch screen from Elo Touch. Here’s how it fit in the decor:

A network of such bulletin boards, allowing hyper-local advertising, seems like a good idea. Monetization can be done in a number of ways:

• Charging for additional QR codes — e.g., map, contact, schedule.
• Custom ad design (including interactive and advanced multimedia features — sound, animation, video).
• A CPA (cost-per-acquisition) model, while tracking interaction via an app — per saved contact, per scheduled appointment, per phone call.
• Premium section.

But… alas… This is as far as we got.

P.S. One notable exception is a touch-screen showing suggestions in Whole Foods in Redwood City.