Input on childish project wanted

[eluser]andriu[/eluser]
Hi everyone

I'm looking for some input on a "hobby" project I'm thinking about doing.

I have a friend who is a bar owner and we sat down discussing how he could increase popularity of his place.

After thinking about it for a while, we came up with the idea of turning the bar in to a "stockmarket" bar on a couple of days a week.

It's not a new idea, but we both loved it.

By "stockmarket" I mean that prices of beverages rises and falls upon client demands.
And of course as any decent stock market bar, it would have market crashes as well

His current POS(till system) was home made by the previous bar owner in Visual Basic and runs of a Access DB.

He's also has 4 tv's in the bar hooked up to his computer.

So my idea was/is to make a flash site that goes fullscreen on the screens, and every 5 minutes checks php for any changes. and displays stock accordingly with nice colours and special effects when the market crashes etc...

And PHP basically just checks the access db for new sales, and calculates the new prices, saves them to the database(so the prices on the till ad up) and then outputs it to flash.

I'm sure coming up with a sustainable formula might take some trial and error,
Anyone with real stock market experience?????

And also a very simple admin, were you can cause a market crash, set min-max prices for drinks. to prevent silly prices...


Do you guys have any interesting input or suggestions about features, possibilities or problems???

I've been thinking if you could make it more interactive by letting clients(do something??) using there mobiles or laptops(as there's free wifi and the amount of people that's got wifi on there phones is just increasing)

I know it's not a new idea, and there might even be companies out there that sells similar things out of the box, but it's quite fun to build anyway!

Looking forward for interesting ideas!

[eluser]mallcom[/eluser]
If you want to get user input from clients (which makes it a lot more fun), then try to use a sms gateway.

Clients come for socialize and fun, it's to much hassle to hook up with wifi and such,
most people even dont know that they've got wifi (not everyone uses a iPhone), but they al do texting(sms).

Let clients register their phonenumber on the bars website.
When the client sends a text it'll show up on the big screen. "Jimmy caused the Jack Daniels stocks crash!!!!"

Consider the marketing value of having all your clients cell numbers.

About the stocks values:

High demand rises prices, low demand lowers them.

Hire a good looking babe to order a drink that nobody drinks ( the one you've got plenty in stock)

[eluser]andriu[/eluser]
Alright not a bad idea at all.

Cheers!