Venture Studio
Work at Play’s venture studio launches at least one company per year. We aim for two.
​
We are entrepreneurs, too. The challenge of developing a new product while operating a business is like building the car while your racing. It simply has to be experienced to be understood. With our decades of product experience, it is this practical understanding of what you are trying to achieve that differentiates us from any product consultant you will meet.
​
Each of our startups is an opportunity to elevate our methodology and expertise.
​
DEQQ APPAREL
Counterfeiting in the art and apparel world is a $584 billion problem.
​
DEQQ is a provenance technology for high value limited edition items. DEQQ reassures consumers are buying an authentic item; it verifies the exclusivity of the item (i.e. this is number 63 of 250), and it attributes ownership of the item.
​
Unlike our competitors, who strictly address provenance to combat counterfeiting, DEQQ brings value to consumers by extending our technology to provide them with a deeper brand connection and experience.
City of Love is a not-for profit company that supports a collective art program where established artists create original art pieces from a collection of smaller art pieces created by children.
​
The challenge and inspiration of diversity
Many student pieces will be unexpected. They will not fit into the artist’s original vision, but addressing that challenge and drawing inspiration from it is part of the primary goal of this project.
A student’s previous art projects ended up isolated on the fridge. Suddenly their work has become a very important contribution to a larger piece of art. And perhaps more importantly, they will see their peers’ art in a different light, unique self expression that is also a vital component to the final piece.
Together we will examine and begin conversations on how the contribution of every individual fits into our collective picture as a society.
CITY OF
LOVE
PLACE
NOTE
PlaceNote was Augmented Reality annotation tool that allows the user to place mixed media information in a spaces or objects around them.
​
PlaceNote started as a proof of tech exploration. After demoing the product broadly across our professional networks, a number of industries expressed trial interest in PlaceNote including law enforcement, construction, and industrial inspection services.
​
We never moved PlaceNote into trials. After researching the requirements for these highly secure and mission critical systems we discovered that the VR functionality was only a “value add” to a much larger solution. The customer’s willingness to pay for PlaceNote was too low to justify further development, so we shut the project down.