Question: Diner Peels $10K Off the Walls, Donates to Charity

Carl Schmidt is surrounded by dollar bills at Fat Smitty's Diner

Fat Smitty’s Diner along Highway 101 in Washington state is known for its oversize burgers and the unusual way customers show appreciation. At the end of a particularly satisfying meal, customers write their name on a dollar bill and tack it to the wall.

“I’ve never taken any dollars down,” Carl Schmidt, the owner since 1983, told the Kitsap Sun. “This money never belonged to me.”

The tradition started in 1985, when a salesman left a single dollar and his business card pinned to the wall after a meal. In the ensuing 27 years, thousands of other customers have follow suit with some walls of the restaurant coated in multiple layers of bills.

Now Schmidt is planning on donating the thousands collected to charity.

As the restaurant was being closed for the season, Schmidt with the help of volunteers, including members of the Boy Scouts of America, collected the money. The volunteers peeled $10,316 worth of dollars from the walls and ceiling.

Schmidt, a retired Marine, told the Kitsap Sun he will donate the money to the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Camp Parsons Boy Scout Camp to fund a new dining hall.

Multiple troops of Boy Scouts have made a tradition of stopping at Fat Smitty’s diner after a camping trip. One wall was covered not only in bills, but in Boy Scout patches.

Casey Carson, Schmidt’s nephew and the manager of the restaurant, says Fat Smitty’s will open again in March with a slightly different look but the same attitude.

“It is hard to take all this down,” said Carson, who was married at the restaurant in 1994. “It makes it easier to know that the money is going to charity, and hopefully people will put it back up again.”

summary: Carl Schmidt is surrounded by dollar bills at Fat Smitty's Diner Fat Smitty’s Diner along Highway 101 in Washington state is known for its oversize burgers and the unusual way customers show appreciation. At the end of a particularly satisfying meal, customers write their name on a dollar bill and tack it to the wall. “I’ve never taken any dollars down,” Carl Schmidt, the owner since 1983, told the Kitsap Sun. “This money never belonged to me.” The tradition started in 1985, when a salesman left a single dollar and his business card pinned to the wall after a meal….

Color's Next Act: Teaming Up With Verizon

Color Labs, the start-up that attracted a tsunami of attention by raising $41 million to build a mobile app for sharing pictures with friends and strangers nearby, is hoping to juice its service with a new partnership with Verizon.

The app was introduced last March. It morphed a few months later into an application that lets people broadcast live video streams to their social networks, allowing friends to “visit,” or tune in and see what their friends are doing at that moment.

Now the company is working with Verizon to release a version of its application optimized for Verizon’s network, in the hope that this will help propel the application into the mainstream.

It’s hard to imagine that the average consumer will be savvy enough to care that an app is running better because of the data network it is using. But Bill Nguyen, the founder and chief executive of the company, says that Verizon’s network is superior and more pervasive than AT&T’s, allowing Color to improve the quality of streamed videos.

Mr. Nguyen, who first met with Verizon executives at the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas, said this was a decision that more app creators will have to make in the future.

“People used to decide whether to develop for Windows or Mac; then they had to decide between the iPhone and Android,” said Mr. Nguyen. “Now they have to decide which network to develop for.”

But Mr. Nguyen said that in order for his app to take off — he says it now has about one million users — people need to be able to use it and not worry that it will run into network snags and hiccups.

Those who are using the app on AT&T won’t be able to record or broadcast audio, he said. He didn’t seem worried about angering or turning off users on networks that are rivals of Verizon.

“We can’t get there without the support of the network,” he said. “People don’t need to think about if it’ll do it, they just need to be able to capture and share info.”

Mr. Nguyen also said that while he thought video was the next big area for start-ups, he did not think that trying to apply the Instagram model — applying filters and special effects — was enough to pretty up short bursts of amateur video content so that people would want to watch it.

“Video doesn’t tend to look that good,” he said. “You still have to produce interesting content.” The average person is not interested, he said, in watching shaky, poorly-lighted video of strangers at a birthday party or goofing off in someone’s basement. But Mr. Nguyen thinks the real opportunity is in live-streaming moments to friends and others who want to tune in.

“The phone is the new TV when it comes to entertainment, and live opens up engagement,” he said.

summary:
Answer: The company behind Color, the splashy mobile application, is trying a new approach to wooing users. It is working with Verizon to release a version of its application that will work better for users on that network.