"I'm doing this to become a media mogul," jokes Amy Alexander, "even though I know we're in the novelty business. We're an impulse buy." With such devil-may-care spirit did the red-haired, 24-year-old native of Dallas, Texas, launch her Website this past May. At ICandyGram (www.icandygram.com), Alexander urges her customers: "Get a lapdance on your laptop!"
The idea is deceptively simple: For a small fee, some nearly-nude nubiles will wriggle and writhe for you, as you dispatch them out to the real world in the form of virtual greeting cards. The site from which they emanate currently features seven girls, all of them professional strippers who dance for a maximum of two minutes per greeting. Users can choose the girl they like and send personalized notes along with her.
These virtual lapdances deliberately stop short of triple-X fare, because Alexander wanted electronic greetings "that a girl can send to her boyfriend and [won't] feel really dirty. Or something you can send in the office and get a good laugh out of it." After spending five months last year researching online, Alexander created her site with the help of three business partners (who prefer not to be named in print), their objective being to find a "middle ground" between Hallmark and hardcore.
She launched a site where users can select and preview a dancer before sending a greeting, after which Amanda, Randee, or Michelle (or, if you prefer, Marjie or Jade or Raquel or Chastity) will do her thing - down to a G-string. The site currently charges $4.95 per card or $9.95 per month and offers a selection of 20 cards, with customized video streaming services also available.
"We have Christmas and Valentine's Day cards, and even one for Fourth of July with a girl in a stars and stripes bikini," Alexander says. She maintains optimism in the face of little hard research, since no one can foretell the demand or staying power of online novelty sites. "I think it's exponential to expendable income," she notes, "but I think we've got a great-looking, user-friendly product."
And is she aware of the irony in having a lapdance site that's so blithely colored - what else but - pink? "Cheesecake was always my favorite dessert," she quips. "I like things cheesy and fluffy, and that's why it's pink. It's a very lighthearted take on what's out there." In the near future, she plans to add cards featuring men who will dance fully nude, for the gay market.
Alexander runs the site from her office in West Hollywood, California, and she oversees filming for the cards at various locations throughout the Los Angeles area. "I'm usually there timing it, literally standing there with my watch going, ?Okay, play with your nipple,' and five seconds later, ?Okay, the coat has to come off now!'" she explains. "And I'll have a director there, and he's going, ?Okay, play with yourself,' or ?Slap your ass.'
"Slappin' ass usually goes very well," she notes, with the slightest hint of a Texas twang. "We had one girl, she slapped her ass so much that when she did her next one, you could see that her butt was still red."
Red asses aside, Alexander also hopes to foster strategic business-to-business alliances through a multitude of services. Currently, these include Internet and multimedia design, content editing, content digitization and storage, e-commerce solutions, streaming video delivery, database creation and management, Web hosting and, when appropriate, server construction.
"However, our main business," she says, "is to provide streaming media technology to our partners, since we can develop and implement video-on-demand, pay-per-view, and subscription services that are skewed toward adult content."
