I can't decide whether this was really cool or just weird. So I'll describe it: I'm sitting on a bench at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland last Friday checking out who's around me. There's a guy from the American Stock Exchange, a couple of American students, a St. Gallen student, a Swiss banker. I know all this without even looking up--the information was on the screen of a little device called SpotMe that made its debut at St. Gallen's annual big event, something called the International Students' Committee Symposium.
The SpotMe tells me who's within range of its "radar"--dividing them into those 1 to 3 meters away from me, 3 to 7, and 7 to 20--and lets me look up their photos, job titles, and addresses. I can also put it on the lookout for someone I want to find, and the device will start shaking when they get close.
None of this technology works perfectly yet: You usually have to click on the "radar" a couple of times before you get an accurate reading, and the shaking-when-it's-found-somebody function is less than reliable. And, of course, everybody around you has to be carrying a SpotMe for it to work at all.
Still, for a 10-employee company from Lausanne (it's called Shockfish) that I doubt spent much more than a million dollars developing the thing, it's pretty impressive, especially since my one experience with anything remotely similar was down the road in Davos in January. At the World Economic Forum there, Compaq, Microsoft, and Accenture equipped the movers and shakers with iPAQ wireless handheld computers that enabled you send messages, check your personalized conference schedule, and, if you knew how to hack past the conference software, even browse the Web.
The iPAQs clearly did a lot more than SpotMe (although Shockfish is hoping to add messaging and personalized schedules before long). But they were also a loss leader. The companies involved spent millions of dollars (2,000 iPAQs at $500 each adds up to $1 million right there, and that doesn't count the servers, wireless transmitters, and brigades of guys and gals standing ready to help when yours crashed) in an effort to make the world's top executives familiar with the possibilities of a new product, one they were allowed to take home with them after the conference.
Shockfish's business plan, on the other hand, is to rent its devices out to conference organizers (and maybe cruise-ship operators) and make enough money doing that to pay the bills. I know that because I sat through a remarkable session at the ISC Symposium where the company's co-founder and chief operating officer, Bendicht Ledin, sat next to one of its angel investors, Heinz Winzeler (who runs a private equity firm called M2 Capital Partners, but has invested his own money, not his clients', in Shockfish) and the two of them talked about their plans and hopes.
Ledin spoke pretty eloquently of the company's philosophy of keeping its product as cheap and simple as possible. He explained that the company is for the moment avoiding standards like Bluetooth and the Palm OS because he and his colleagues want to focus at first on creating a product that people will use, and adhering to such standards would only slow that process down. Then Winzeler told how he'd been impressed by Ledin and his colleagues because they didn't overpromise--and so far they've delivered.
A skeptical questioner from the audience (an old friend of Winzeler, it turned out) pretty quickly hit on an obvious conflict. Renting out SpotMes at conferences might be good little business, but it was never going to be a huge one, which meant it would be hard to take the company public. And wasn't taking a company public the goal of all self-respecting venture capitalists and even angel investors?
Winzeler's initial response was a bit defensive--he said he assumes Shockfish will eventually come up with more products, then reminisced wistfully about the IPO market of 18 months ago. Then he admitted that, yeah, this was an issue. But so far Shockfish's management team has met every target it set when it got funded a year ago, Winzeler said, adding that before too long the company's founders might be able to afford to just buy their investors out.
I asked a bunch of questions during the session, and when a couple hours later I ran into Shockfish COO Ledin in a hallway, he seemed very eager to talk to me. At first I figured that was because I'm a business journalist and he wanted publicity. That's what all tech startups want, right? But no; I'd let slip that I'd used one of those iPAQs at Davos and Ledin wanted to know, in great detail, how the thing stacked up against his SpotMe.
Let me get this straight: a tech company of very modest ambition with an angel investor who's not expecting a big score and a top executive who seems obsessed with finding out what customers actually want. Now I don't know if all this is a post-crash thing, or a Swiss thing, or a Heinz Winzeler and Bendicht Ledin thing, but I have to say I like it.
***
I have to say I liked the ISC Symposium too. That's partly because, as a member of the symposium "faculty" (I moderated a panel discussion on the power of the media), I was met on the jetway in Zurich by an airport official who whisked me through immigration and delivered me to a fresh-faced, besuited young St. Gallen student who drove me to the conference in a silver Audi. That kind of VIP treatment is swell, especially when you're not in fact important. But it wasn't just that; the symposium's biggest selling point was the quirky mix of business executives, college students from around the world who won a competition to get invited, media types, and assorted other hangers-on who showed.
I ended in up discussions with two wonderfully opinionated, wonderfully smart students from Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology. I talked to a student from Calcutta about the relative merits of the U.S., British, and Indian versions of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire?" And over dinner with Shockfish's Ledin I found out that until about four days before the conference, he wasn't sure his company would be able to get SpotMe ready in time.
