Little business: big appetites

By PETER GRIFFIN

A shop on Auckland's busy New North Rd is fast becoming a gathering point for geeks with big appetites for computing power.

It's not Harvey Norman or Noel Leeming. You can expect better service than those franchise computer sellers will deliver. But don't expect the same bargains.

In business for eight months, Computer Lounge is making a name as a computer seller to the top end of the market.

"Our customers never ask for discounts. They know what they want and are willing to pay to get it," says co-director Paul Pattison, a 10-year veteran of the PC industry who cut his teeth with entrepreneur Sharon Hunter during the 90s at PC Direct.

At Computer Lounge, the average price of a PC is between $4000 and $5000 - when a reasonably powerful machine can now be bought for about $2000.

As multinational players such as HP and Dell fight it out with the local "white box" PC assemblers and the price of an entry-level PC dips towards $700, Computer Lounge is heading in the other direction.

A few weeks back a customer bought $21,000 of computing gear.

This is a world where a gigabyte of memory is standard - the rest of us work with half of that at the most.

Here you can forget anything less than a 3GHz (gigahertz) Pentium processor.

And the graphics cards and LCD screens will power the fastest and most complex of shoot 'em up role-playing games.

These people aren't just surfing the web and sending email.

The computing they are doing - for business or pleasure - requires serious processing power, and Computer Lounge has built a thriving little business serving this elite.

"You're not going to get that type of performance out of $999 Dell machine and if you email them for support, the email isn't going to be received in this country," said Pattison, who claims to spend an average of five hours tailor-making a customer's machine.

But Computer Lounge's customers are often the type who would rather put together their own machines.

Online gaming fanatic Duncan Meek paid $4000 to Computer Lounge for components to build his own machine.

The telecoms industry worker spends his spare time challenging other gamers online in multiplayer sessions of titles such as Battlefield: 1941.

"I upgrade my system ever few months," says Meek, who ironically still uses a cathode ray tube monitor because he is yet to find an LCD screen that's good enough to meet his gaming needs.

Another gamer, Brecon Charcroft, forked out $4600 for a custom-built machine complete with neon lights.

Charcroft also needs speed to keep up with his fellow gamers, especially as new games appear on the market with increasingly sophisticated graphics.

"I'm really waiting for Doom 3 to come out," said Charcroft, who by day works for Toyota Finance.

"The next upgrade will be memory, to two gigabytes, that will do me for the next six months," he adds.

The package from Computer Lounge included a top-of-the-line Creative sound card, which Charcroft is using in conjunction with Fruityloops music editing software for laying down drum and bass tracks.

Eventually, he'll feed his turn tables directly into the computer to record his own creations.

But well-off gamers and amateur sound engineers are not the only target market. Computer Lounge is also putting machines together for the new media industry - graphic designers, animators and web developers.

Mike Heffernan, head of animation company Magimation, spent tens of thousands of dollars at Computer Lounge on nine souped-up machines to run the studio's animation development.

Heffernan's team is putting together animated TV programmes it hopes to sell to US and European networks this year.

Among the original programmes are Alpha, which Heffernan describes as "Melrose Place in space" and a fantasy story about a lost Maori tribe who end up on Mars.

Another is a fantasy set in hell which features a demon detective.

"We're got three hot trailers we hope to wow the likes of Fox and MTV with,"says Heffernan.

"Peter Jackson has done a good job in film, but there's a wide open space in TV as far as computer graphics and animation go."

The studio is creating its animations using the Maya software, which requires strong processing power and advanced graphics cards.

Heffernan says new computer technology allows his young animation designers to work on projects that previously only big studios could have tackled.

"The current generation looks at a movie like Toy Story the same way as the baby boomers viewed Bambi," says.

"The computers are cheaper and the software is better."

Heffernan estimates he would need up to 60 top-end machines and a server if he were to win some work with a major production company.

In the miniatures department of Big Primate Pictures, a Wellington production company working on Peter Jackson's next epic, King Kong, Jennie Winter is toiling away on a grunty Computer Lounge system.

A technical glitch was causing her problems this week, one that Computer Lounge was putting a technician on a plane bound for Wellington to fix.

After all, that's the type of service high-end PC buyers expect.

Pattison said support was a crucial plank of the business and he saw poor support as the failing of larger companies.

"I think PC Company went wrong because they got too big too fast," he says. "Then they fell down in support."

Which doesn't mean that Computer Lounge plans to stay a one-shop operation. The company has plans for expansion both with bricks and mortar stores and a larger online presence.

At the moment, the company cannot stray into Apple Macintosh territory.

"We were told we're too close to Magnum Mac to be able to sell Mac computers," says Pattison.

In the meantime, word is getting out about Computer Lounge to less sophisticated PC buyers, who appreciate the softer sell and the high-quality merchandise.

Pattison recently sold a computer to television and radio personality the "Bugman" Ruud Kleinpaste, who walked in off the street with his son.

"They'd obliviously been looking around a lot of places. After an hour of listening to us explain the options, he handed over his credit card."

Computer Lounge