Experience Manifesto

Ready for Members!

Excited to announce that after a few months of working on the infrastructure of the space, we're ready to open our doors to members! We are creating a word-class accelerator for companies working in retail, VR/AR and out-of-home (OOH). As we looked for our own space, we quickly realized that many coworking spaces are great for working, they are usually not very good if you need to do demonstrations of physical technologies.

Our space is just across the river from NYC, a short PATH train ride away in Jersey City. With 14,000 sf (and another 14,000 available if needed!), we have plenty of room to grow; set up your technology for live demos, meetings, seminars and getting work done in a living, breathing, future factory. It allows for you to go from concept to a real-world testing environment and get instantaneous data and feedback. This also allows our members from outside of the United States to have a US office location. We even provide staffing to present your products when you are away. And did I mention that the Cake Boss bakery is in the building too?

What we offer:

• Shared Space working with BEL design team
• Access to tech member network spaces while in NY
• Client support for hosted meetings
• Desks & office furniture 
• Conference room facilities
• Use of the shared space to host up to 4 events per year
• Demonstration area to present products and technology
• Kitchen for your staff and guests
• Wi-fi connectivity throughout premises

In addition, all members can participate in all events hosted on the premises including (based on availability and suitability) client presentations, industry specific events, meet-ups with other entrepreneurs, workshops about general business topics; demonstration events.

For members, BEL is your brand accelerator, helping you grow your business by:

• Demonstrating your technology to key retailers and clients.
• Presenting your technology to Unified/BEL clients and contacts.
• Working with Unified Merchandising LLC for manufacturing support, from prototype through final product.

Lastly, for companies outside of NYC, the BEL staff can act as your local business development staff. We can represent you in all client presentations that are necessary, acting as your staff on the ground in NYC and in the States. This allows you to be able to react quickly to client requests, without incurring last minute travel expenses.

Julian Fisher, CEO of our first member company, jisp said, "We are thrilled to be the first to take our place inside the Brand Experience Lab showing how the simplest, fastest and most seamless route to outstanding customer service lies in the hands of every shopper, their cell phone. And with jisp it is an experience once tried you’ll never want to shop any other way. It maybe a small step for shoppers but it’s a giant leap for retail."

Want to learn more about what we're doing? If you're developing innovative, new tech for the retail industry, click here to learn about our membership program.

If you're looking for space for your company, you can email David or Jim and we can give you additional information. You can also click here to download our full presentation.

Here are a few pictures of the space, come visit and see what it looks like in person! You can go to Brand Experience Lab for directions to our space. Hope to see you soon.

ETC 20TH Anniversary

Last weekend, Jim Ackerman and I had the chance to go down and help the Entertainment Technology Center at CMU celebrate their 20th anniversary. The Brand Experience Lab is starting to work with them on a number of initiatives and hope to have some of their most exciting technologies here in our space in Jersey City early next year.

Some 20+ years ago, I had the great fortune to meet Don Marinelli, then the Associate head of the drama department at Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and and Scott Stevens, then with the computer sciences department at CMU. At the time, he and other CMU colleagues were working to develop a new program there, combining theater and tech into one program, the Entertainment Technology Center. As described on their website:

The Entertainment Technology Center (ETC) was founded in 1998, and admitted its first class of graduate students in the fall of 1999. The ETC is an interdisciplinary research center offering a Master of Entertainment Technology (MET) that is a joint venture between Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science and College of Fine Arts. In the spirit of the ETC’s interdisciplinary focus, the center had two co-directors; Randy Pausch, a CS professor (who later delivered his inspirational Last Lecture), and Don Marinelli, a Drama Professor.

To this day, the ETC looks to continue being one of the most inventive and impactful programs in the world. Randy Pausch liked to say that the ETC is the world’s best playground, with an electric fence. Or in other words, the ETC provides the contexts, processes and best practices for the design and development of creative experiences. Since our first class, we have graduated a substantial and successful group of over 700 alumni, that help illustrate the solid basis of the ETC’s curriculum, which balances educational goals, professional development, and engaging experiences, or learn, work and play.

As always, we saw some great projects from the students, both full semester work as well as projects done in just one or two weeks. We were particularly drawn to experiences like Face2Face, where two people have to create one face and then follow a series of patterns by raising an eyebrow or puffing up a cheek. The fact that two people had to work together made it fun, as you can see by the short video below.

Another favorite was Goal in the Wall, a Kinect-based game with the twist of telling you the body part you needed to use for that specific round. Although Jim beat me all three games, we both had a fun time.

Back in the late 90's, when I first met Don and Scott Stevens, I was working with an agency and building one of my first experience environments and they work that they were doing at the ETC fit in quite well with what I was building. One of the first things I showed was a Synthetic Interview, a technology developed in the late 90's and we pretty quickly ended up doing a Synthetic Interview for GSK's Nicorette brand, letting you talk to Arnold Palmer and asking him questions both about why you should stop smoking and about his long experience golfing.

When we opened our first playground in NYC, technologies from the ETC were front and center in our experience. One of the first things we brought to our space was a very cool, audience interactive experience. The very first game I saw was the Baby Game, but we knew it would be something we could do a lot with.

We eventually turned it into a successful product that I called AudienceGames. We did very successful programs for Orange, Volvo, which won a Bronze Lion at Cannes and, it all started with msnbc and a program called Newsbreaker Live. That program traveled for the summer of 2007 and was called one of the best marketing ideas in the world. We had a great deal of fun working on this program and it was really great to bring one of the ETC technologies into the world.

We also had a Jam-O-Drum in our space, really one of my favorite experiences from the ETC. I loved that it was multiplayer experience that required 4 players to make the game work. Now that we're spending so much time in our individual worlds, this very social game experience is much more relevant if you're building physical spaces than it was when it was first introduced.

Lastly, the ETC created Quasi, an interactive robot that became the mascot for Give Kids the World that my daughter absolutely loved at the time. He came to NYC several times and traveled quite frequently, even making an appearance at the Super Bowl.