Building an "Online" company

How do you build an "online" company? One where most of the workers call Starbucks, the office?

How do you have meetings?
What do you do if a laptop gets stolen?
Do you need face time?

I may or may not answer all of these questions. But they are interesting. Lets approach these backwards. From a brick and mortar company.

What would starbucks look like as an online company(more integrated into new tools, not digital cups of coffee). Their star partners(employees for those of you not up on the lingo) would blog about what it was like to work there. They would write comments about their favorite customers. It could be a door into deepining that 1 min a day conversation with those interesting artistic (or whatever) folks.

Maybe they would have a wiki for secret shopping excursions, and have people who know alot about coffee go in and do their snapshots (secret shoping) for the company, in exchange for a free cup of joe (you economists can ponder the principal agent problems of this, but it could work).

The key here is that it is user generated content, and categorization (more on the categorization in my tags post, and future folksonomies posts) of that content. It has the potential of a huge network of information, and a kind of grass roots marketing, while building the lifetime value of a customer by deepening the connections with those customers. It would also make recent new additions to the neighborhood (metephorical social "neighborhood", or whatever..... you know what I mean).

Internally there could be wikis for all kinds of stuff. Best practices of the coffee masters for how to make the best french press, repairmen sharing the latest problems and bootstrap solutions to fixing the latest brewer. By having the people "in the trenches" create and update the info, you always have current info. Sure there are problems, pr issues and whatnot, but that is where the corporate wiki could champion the good contributors, and discourage the bad ones (not sure what this all looks like yet, but who does?)

So none of those questions got answered, but I think going from what currently could work is a good start. How do you know what is on the other side of that mountain, unless you start writing erp, crm, charts and graphs of the best possible route..... I mean try and put two feet forward to climb that mountain?