uWink Bistro Blog

Last summer I thought uWink’s TV debut would be January 2007, when reality TV show, Top Chef, airs an episode filmed at uWink.  Little did I know that we’d have CNBC, LA TV, FOX 13, AP TV, and so many others, filming uWink!

 To catch uWink’s pre-opening TV debut, tune into the BRAVO channel, Wednesday, January 10th.  Check your local schedule for show times, but in LA it is on at 10 p.m.

 Also, we’ll be watching the episode LIVE at uWink on January 10th, so if you want to come down and join in the fun, we’d love to share with you the back story!

BTW, the episode is entitled: “Unhappy Customers”.  Remember the episode was filmed at uWink over the summer, before uWink was opened, so don’t be thinkin’ that it was uWink’s customers that were unhappy! 

Bon Appetit!

Atari founder serves games, food and possibly love
Fri Dec 22, 2006 8:52 AM ET
By Lisa Baertlein

LOS ANGELES, Dec 22 (Reuters Life!) - Lovelorn video gamers who are better with consoles than conversation, have a new venue — a restaurant where each table has touchscreens for ordering food and for playing a variety of social games. Entrepreneur Nolan Bushnell, founder of the original Atari game company and the children’s U.S. restaurant franchise Chuck E. Cheese, has set up uWink in a shopping mall in Woodland Hills, a Los Angeles suburb, to attract an adult dating set.

“This isn’t for 18-year-old testosterone junkies who are into playing ‘Halo’,” Bushnell said, referring to a Microsoft Corp.’s alien shoot-up game. Bushnell, a life-long gamer and uWink’s master game designer, cemented his place in video game history three decades ago when he introduced Atari’s first product — the now legendary table tennis game “Pong” — to the world. He sold Atari in 1976, four years after its was launched.

Bushnell’s new target market is 21 to 35 year old women, although he also hopes to appeal to school kids and families during the day. “If you’ve got a restaurant full of women, you’re automatically going to attract men,” he said.

The new restaurant, which Bushnell wants to franchise, is steeped in LA cool — with dark wood, sleek surfaces, videos projected onto walls, bistro fare and sophisticated adult cocktails. It is a far cry from his first restaurant venture, Chuck E. Cheese, where kids go for pizza, arcade games and birthday cake, although the central theme — gaming — is the same. Nolan, who took Chuck E. Cheese public and left the company in 1983, has already established uWink as a public company that trades under the ticker UWNK.

Each table at uWink has a pair of touchscreens for ordering food and playing conversation-fueling trivia games covering everything from entertainment to politics and sports. The library at uWink, which opened in October this year, already has more than two years of game content, including more than 45,000 questions that update weekly.

But Bushnell wants mingling to be the name of the game at uWink, which hosts “room games” where every table in the restaurant can compete simultaneously. The next level of play, to be introduced soon, is table-to-table competition. Players can stand at so-called party tables and play a fast-paced, six-player game called “Ping” — a tribute to “Pong.”

Bushnell said one of his goals is to take the social risk out of buying a stranger a drink.

“The only thing we’re not going to do is determine who is hot and who’s isn’t,” he joked, referring to hotornot.com, an online dating site where people rate each other’s looks.

P.S. FYI - Reuters is one of the top news distributions services in the WORLD. This article is available for any news service (newspapers, magazines, radio, etc.) to use. So you may see it in Iowa or Indonesia.

We’re in the process of updating/revamping/changing/morphing/etc. uWink’s website and it’s looking great! 

We know our present website doesn’t reflect the current state of our business or our aspirations! 

So Stay Tuned! 

We look foward to showing you our new website in the New Year! 

Happy Holidays!

LA Weekly wrote a nice piece about uWink… Check it out!

http://www.laweekly.com/eat+drink/first-bite/electric-meals/15150/

The NRA announced a forcast yesterday (December 12, 2006) and here’s what they said about self-ordering… ”Diners Like To Serve Themselves. 46% of Americans say they are likely to use customer-activated ordering and payment terminals if available in their favorite table- service restaurant. Younger consumers are more likely to do so, as 71% of 18 to 24-year-olds, and 64% of 25 to 34-year-olds say they would. About 50% of all adults - and roughly 2/3 of those aged 18 to 34 - say they would use a self-serve order and payment terminal at a quick-service restaurant if it were available.”

To Our Shareholders:

I am writing today to update you on our amended Form SB-2 registration statement filed with the SEC on December 8, 2006 and other amended SEC filings we have made in the last 10 days.

This year we raised a total of approximately $3,000,000 from 63 investors in two private placement transactions, one in March 2006 and the other in September 2006. In these transactions we sold approximately 10,000,000 shares of common stock and 5,000,000 warrants to purchase common stock (a warrant is a right to purchase a share of common stock at a fixed price). We priced both these transactions at $0.30 per share (and the exercise price of the warrants at $0.345 per share), at a time when our stock was consistently trading below $0.30.

The investors in these transactions were largely our officers and directors and our friends and family, and we appreciate their faith and support during this important year for our company. We used the proceeds from these transactions to develop and open our first uWink restaurant in Woodland Hills, California.

Like many small public companies, we, in conjunction with our financial, legal and accounting advisors, structured and accounted for these transactions as typical PIPEs (private investments in public entities). Because the securities we issued in these transactions cannot be resold (at least for the first year) without registration with the SEC, we agreed with our investors that we would file a registration statement with the SEC to allow for the resale of their shares and warrants, as is typical in PIPE transactions. In addition, as is typical in PIPE transactions, we agreed that, if this registration statement was not “effective” within 180 days, we would pay the investors monthly cash penalties equal to 1.5% of their investment until the registration statement became “effective”.

We filed a registration statement on Form SB-2 with the SEC on September 29, 2006 to register for resale the approximately 10,000,000 shares and 5,000,000 warrants we issued in these transactions. Shortly thereafter, the SEC notified us that they would “review” our registration statement, a standard process during which the SEC reviews the information provided by the company and, generally, issues a comment letter to the company suggesting improvements and clarifications.

We received a comment letter from the SEC on November 9, 2006. We filed an amended SB-2 registration statement on December 8, 2006 with the responses to those comments, as well as an amended annual report for 2005 and amended quarterly reports for 2004 and 2006, providing additional and revised information in response to the SEC comments.

In that letter, the SEC raised two questions in particular that required significant revisions to our previous filings.

Firstly, the SEC questioned whether the shares and warrants we were proposing to register for resale were eligible for resale on a “shelf” registration, given the number of securities registered relative to our total shares outstanding and given that certain of our officers and directors were registering securities for resale.

In response, our officers and directors have agreed to remove all their shares and warrants from the registration statement and our other 2006 investors have agreed to remove their warrants from the registration statement. As a result, we reduced the number of shares being registered for resale from 15,867,001 to 7,495,254 (30% of our total outstanding) in our amended SB-2 registration statement.

Secondly, the SEC questioned our accounting for the warrants issued in our 2006 private placements. Originally, in consultation with our outside auditors, we accounted for the value of the warrants (as calculated using the Black Scholes valuation formula) in the equity section of our balance sheet. In their letter to us, the SEC questioned whether we should instead account for the value of these warrants as an expense on the income statement and as a liability on the balance sheet, because we were obligated to pay penalties to our investors for failure to register the warrants.

At the time we received the SEC letter, our outside auditors advised us that the SEC was now requiring expense/liability accounting treatment for warrants like ours. Therefore, we decided to amend and restate our 2006 quarterly financial statements to reflect an expense on the income statement and liability on the balance sheet for the Black Scholes value of the warrants issued to investors in 2006.

Our 2006 investors have now permanently waived both their right to have their warrants registered and to receive penalty payments for our failure to register their warrants. Thus, it is important to note that we do not have any monetary obligation in respect of these warrants. In addition, we believe we now have a strong argument to remove the warrant liability from our balance sheet at December 31, 2006.

Above all else, we believe in open communication with our shareholders and hope that this letter will help explain our recent SEC filings. Please do not hesitate to contact me at cfo@uwink.com or at 818 909 6030 ext 112 with any questions.

Respectfully,
Peter Wilkniss
Chief Financial Officer

Red Herring posted a new interview with Nolan today. Topics include franchising uWink, social gaming, and the console wars.

Read it here.