LEWISTON — A local machinist wants to replace every bar, pub and restaurant’s ubiquitous chalkboard full of specials with a video screen.

“There just seemed to be a better way than the chalkboard,” said Tim Tardif, 48, who owns Molds Plus in Hill Mill. A pub with its own TV channel could promote specials, preview live entertainment and give patrons a place to share pictures and video.

Tardif named it “ugoout.com.”

For now, the little Internet startup (pronounced “you go out”) is based in a corner of Tardif’s machine shop, with his cocktail-glass logo hanging above the lunchroom table.

After two years of work, he has a pair of partners who are working through the technical issues — Barclay Layman of Auburn and Mike Chalis of Chicago. They have been testing with three local businesses — the Gridiron Restaurant and the Irish Twins Pub in Lewiston and Gipper’s Sports Grill in Auburn.

And they’re 30 days from launching smartphone applications for the Apple iPhone and Android devices.

“In a year, I would like to see the site in at least 100 clubs covering a lot of New England,” Tardif said. Once people see what they can do, they tend to like it, he said.

Describing what the site does can be a chore, though.

Member restaurants can do what they want with the channel. One piece is having constantly updated information on a centrally located screen: happy hours, special food and drink menu items and other announcements would all be game.

From the smartphone application, customers can view an individual restaurants’s channel and send in their own photos.

Restaurants will be able to customize their channels on an iPad tablet. The channel itself will stream over the Internet from a ugoout.com computer. The establishment streams video to its TV via a custom channel on a Roku player, a device sold in TV stores that can deliver Netflix and other Internet programming to a home TV.

Tardif and his partners already have a deal with the nationwide manufacturer.

“They’re definitely a champion of our efforts,” said Layman, who wrote the code on which the site is based.

Tardif first worked with another developer, but that partnership failed. He found Layman through a cousin. Quickly, Layman agreed with Tardif that no one else was doing what he was suggesting.

“I did my due diligence,” Layman said. “It’s like nothing out there.”

Two months ago, they launched at the Irish Twins Pub.

“I think it will catch on,” pub owner Debbie Martel said Thursday. She and her customers are learning how to access the channel, sharing pictures and specials.

“I don’t know why someone would choose not to use it,” she said.

Tardif said he hopes people will take to it the way his 16-year-old daughter adopted Facebook.

She and her friends can shoot 50 pictures and spend hours looking at other people’s photos, he said.

Layman said he was impressed with Tardif’s vision for the site, even if it didn’t sprout from a college campus like so many famous Internet startups.

“It was a great idea,” Layman said. “Great ideas don’t have to come from 20-somethings.”

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