Stukholz-Gemeinschaft Future Research Institute - "Realizing tomorrow, today." A fine history of German engineering going back over 70 years. Sumitomo Heavy Mechatronics Corporation - "When you need a secure mode of cross-country transport, our armored trucks are the best! Serving the New Shanghai-Elysium corridor for over 12 years." Morchetta Gravel Company - providing quality landscaping for hypercorp habitats in the inner system. Now specializing in low-gravity zen gardens!

Herbo wrote:

Central Periphery (Planetary Consortium Exchange: HCP) - "Let us inspire you." Some of their more "luxurious" features are now standard (thanks to piracy and general advancement of tech), but they provide a certain special something that still make them sought after in certain social groups of the inner system and are considered first rate in many outer system social circles.

what is that something, exactly? what would they have that, say, Daiva, my story's heroine's muse, doesn't? I like the idea of having greek theme muses. Would they have some special security sentr robot's AI line called the Saints? I know, I know, too much Saint Seiya for me when I was a kid, but that would make a nice product that would remind some gerontocrats about their youth.

Quincey Forder wrote:

what is that something, exactly? what would they have that, say, Daiva, my story's heroine's muse, doesn't?

I couldn't come up with anything satisfying so I defaulted to the gimp-tastic italics "something." [collapse collapsed]My initial take on their faded luxury status was based on a late 90's model Lexus I saw in traffic the other day (with a very snooty driver at the wheel), and the continued use of vinyl as a sign of hipster musical taste. Branding and 'old school' is something that the human mind latches onto with ease. For a nigh-immortal transhuman populace, nostalgia and identifiable brands are going to have at least a small following. As far as a list of somethings a Central Periphery Colliope muse can do that a Daiva can't? Probably nothing functionally, and it may do some tasks less efficiently. However, the interface or styling is probably something iconic and "classic" and there will be an undercurrent of technosavies that prefer a robust and well vetted Central Periphery AI to a more sleek and upraded muse with the latest OS upgrades like Daiva. Imagine the edition wars on the mesh between something as simple as Daiva 1.0 to Daiva 2.0!? "Oh you have the new OS? Tool! They broke it once they merged with Tex-Packard last year and forced out their inferior product in the shell of a Daiva!!!!" In the mesh forums for Central Periphery you would get the conversations of "hey I just got my Colliope and all my preferences transfered just fine, but I notice that she doesn't have the same [fill in technical jargon] as my Daiva did." followed by "if you weren't such a drooler you probably would have found [mesh link] and studied up before wasting our time. Can someone moderate this noob s--!?"[/collapse] Here's another one I thought of this morning. K&B Broad Horizons (Planetary Consortium Exchange: KBH) - "Connecting People & Technology" Kelly & Beard was a pre-fall mergers and acquisitions company with holdings in multiple industrial sectors and a solid growth plan. When the fall occured only their newest communications company Broad Horizons was on hand to provide evacuation of essential terestrial personnel via ego-casting and uploading. The members of the board of directors for Kelly & Beard were never on Earth, but via the power of nepotism they had a cluster of individuals that required their attentions and thus Broad Horizons became very important virtually over night. It was the quick thinking of several key members of newly aquired Broad Horizons (their corporate staff having not been repurposed/laid off yet) that put them on the leading edge of providing emergency upload services to those unable to secure ego-casting or physical escape from the deteriorating situation on Earth. Of course they didn't do this for free (the price for their services was essentially emptied pockets plus a little more). In the end, they aquired so much raw capital and so many infogee indentures in such a short span of time, that they became one of the "hypercorps to watch" in who's who datastreams and news vids. After the Fall, Broad Horizons was one of the only remaining entities Kelly & Beard owned that hadn't been destroyed, hostily taken over or rendered irrelevant in a post-earth system. Broad Horizons was also quite wealthy prompting the corporation's name rebranding to K&B Broad Horizons. In the 10 years since the Fall, Broad Horizons has dealt less and less with ego-casting and other communications services and more in brokering infomorph indentures between other larger hypercorporations. They've also begun to develop an even less savory business unit (beneath even the infomorph slave trade?) that is dedicated to "repossessing" Egos from persons unable to afford their significant debt sources (financial or otherwise). How this isn't just corporate forknapping is answered by several recent loopholes in the hypercorporate legal structure. Suffice it to say that getting a message from the Broad Horizons Collections Department requesting your presence at one of their local branches to settle up debts is disconcerting at the least. Rumor that they also deal with triad forknappers is hopefully just that...a rumor.

Dìpíngxiàn (Horizon) Discovery - Legal discovery and investigation. Before the Fall mainly doing pre-trial legal discovery for law firms (digging up documents, sending out requests and subpoenas for documents, admissions and depositions). After the Fall the legal environment changed and the corp also branched out into investigation. Clients hire Horizon to gather data and evidence; the company knows all legal rules and have extensive data mining contracts allowing it to sift through the mesh and more private databases for useful information. They rarely send private eyes or direct surveillance, instead they infer an amazing amount of information about the target or topic indirectly through open means and clever algorithms. While far more specialized and smaller than Stellar Intelligence, they are a real player in inner system data mining business.

While this thread's been resurrected, I would like to put out that I love the idea of Starbucks still existing in the future, and as a major power at that. A corporation that survived the Fall and has firmly entrenched itself into Consortium politics. I've been toying with the idea of them replacing the Prosperity Group, just because.