What is the problem with coffee shops? At least in Dublin, coffee is huge business. There are 22 Starbucks outlets alone, in a city of just over a million people. There are 52 Insomnia outlets (note: some are just stands in Spar stores). There’s Costa Coffee, Bewleys, Java Republic, Tim Hortons and many more chain outlets. These sit alongside just as many, if not more, indie places like 3FE, the new one above FilmBase, etc.

Rent in Dublin is also quite high. You can expect to rent retail space for hundreds of euro per day in the city center, which means you need quite a high turnaround to pay bills, wages, overheads and make a little profit. Coffee is a high-turnaround kind of business which helps. However, most coffee shops are aimed at getting you out the door with a take out cup rather than getting you to sit down and have a chat, or get work done.

Coffee shops are the ideal place to get work done, though. Some decent wifi, coffee refills and power outlets are all that a good developer or student needs. These kinds of lessons are learned by students in any college. I am a D.I.T. graduate (with little to show for it, mind you!). In D.I.T. we had awful coffee (recently they’ve installed Insomnia machines) but we drank it because it was cheap, there was somewhere to sit with a laptop, there was wifi and importantly, you could plug in your laptop. Hell, it wasn’t exactly unknown to plug in a Playstation.

I’ve skipped classes to do to the canteen and sit there with the bustle around me working away on projects, assignments or personal bits and pieces. From the mundane checking of emails to the learning of how-to-do-this-or-that type of activity.

However there’s one major key advantage that college had over anywhere else. I could easily get up, leave my bag, jacket & laptop behind and go get another coffee. I could then expect to return to the same scene I had left behind. Though perhaps with the added bonus of being fraped. Otherwise, everything would be fine.

And this is the problem with coffee shops in Dublin. They are actually quite fine for learning, development or just sitting around with a laptop, but they have terrible sub-par wifi for the most part (or make you jump through hoops to get onto it). They also rarely provide easy access to plugs. The fact that people can name where the outlets are in Starbucks stores in Dublin should be more worrying than it is! The number one problem, though, is that it is next to impossible to get up and safely get another coffee. You’re likely to return to someone else sitting in your chair with all your belongings well on their way to eBay. To counter that, you’re rarely ever able to ask staff for another coffee unless it’s a smaller boutique one when they’re empty.

This is why Philip Rosedale’s idea in San Francisco is brilliant. Lay out the coffee shop properly, give everyone plugs, wifi and reasonably priced coffee in a central location. Then, use in-store screens to broadcast what people are doing. Then give them virtual currency (remember, Mr. Rosedale did Second Life beforehand). If you have more virtual currency than someone else, you get more coffee or discounts, plus you get dibs on a chair! The exchange being that you’re in there to do development work, and this work is being advertised on the screens. If I come into this coffee shop I can see a guy doing work with a database and I have an idea that needs such a developer. Cue interesting entrepreneur-esque conversation.

This makes the coffee shop serve as more of a community center for people rather then a cattle call for coffee. It also adds more value to the experience then the simple stuff. Paying the rent is easier if it’s easier to get a coffee. If the rent in the building is €200 per day and you have 25 chairs, then you need to work out how much coffee the person at each chair needs to drink for that space to turn over revenue. Introduce the idea of conversations and social interaction and the coffee will buy itself, as long as there’s an easy way to get it (having baristas walk around would help!).

Now, someone with money come talk to me and we’ll hatch this plan in Grand Canal Dock. Tell me you can’t put Starbucks out of business with that idea!