By Steve Maas
STEPHEN RANDALL developed the world’s first electronic guitar, a pen-based computer, and a mobile operating system for a consortium of cell-phone makers. But by his own standards the 50-year-old British native considers himself a failure. Success for Randall means creating something “that will change the world.”
And that is what he hopes to do with his Cambridge startup, LocaModa. The company has created a platform—“the connective tissue”—for tying the Internet to the physical world, creating “the Web outside. ”Within three to five years, Randall hopes people will find it as natural to use their cell phones to interact with a public sign or a tavern screen as it is to tap away at home on a laptop.
Randall doesn’t actually build things or write software. He has no formal technical training. His talent is coming up with ideas and—just as important—seeing them through. Ironically, this man whose mind is fixated on the future bought the second-oldest house in Wellesley when his family moved from their native Britain six years ago. It was picked out by his wife, an actress who starred on British television; we’ll get to her story later.
But first more on Randall’s vision. He expects people will routinely use their cell phones to text message video screens in pubs and coffeehouses, storefront windows, and mall courtyards—even jukeboxes and virtual screens hosted by wireless networks. In turn, bricks and mortar spots would have a greater Web presence as their customers link to their screens through social-networking sites.
“This is the way the world is moving,” Randall says. “People live on Google; they live on My Space; they live on eBay. Those Web sites are like their oxygen. When they close that front door and go out to the big world, they’re starving for oxygen. ”
This spring, LocaModa plans a burst of oxygen as it rolls out software enabling Facebook members to display the messages that are on the screens of their favorite hangouts and, when they post, to alert friends automatically. Since postings are made by text messaging, the sender could be anywhere. So while you’re vacationing in Florida, you could connect with your friends back home via a screen at the corner pub—as well as with a Facebook pal surfing the Web at a coffeehouse in California. Randall has coined the word “Wiffiti” for this electronic scribbling, combining the words wireless and graffiti; he hopes it lands in the dictionary. “In a bar, this is used to flirt. In a political rally, it’s used to campaign,” he says.
Among LocaModa’s clients is Barack Obama’s organization, which has posted a Wiffiti screen on the Web and may use the technology at the Democratic Convention. LocaModa is marketing the platform to conferences as a way to promote audience participation. It was used last year at the YearlyKos convention of political bloggers.
Randall predicts it will become common for candidates to speak against the backdrop of giant video screens, as their audience in the hall (and on the Web) barrages them with text messages—visually cheering and heckling.
LocaModa is already making its mark in one of America’s most iconic spots: Times Square. It operates a word game, Jumbli, that pops up four times an hour on Clear Channel Spectacolor's 40-by-40-foot digital screen. Anyone can play by text messaging with a cell phone. You don’t have to be inTimes Square to see the screen and play; just grab your cellphone and visit www. jumbli. tv. The goal is to create the highest-scoring word out of a jumble of letters; the prize is your name flashed on the screen.
Gimmicky? Perhaps, but it does glue eyeballs to the screen, drawing attention to the surrounding ads. And factoring in the Internet, the number of eyeballs multiplies exponentially. LocaModa records the number of unique phones that text message, providing a tool for measuring how many people are seeing the ads—a billboard-version of the Nielsen ratings.
LocaModa has its interactive platform installed at 500 locations nationwide— including Toscanini’s down the street from its Cambridge office. (When the ice cream parlor was on the verge of closing last winter for failing to pay back taxes, LocaModa posted aWiffiti screen on the Internet to whip up donations. ) In the works are partnerships that will expand the number of locations within a year to 50,000, according to Randall. Most are in the United States, but some are as far away as Japan—not that distance matters once they’re tied to the Internet.
While he hopes to tap into the multibillion-dollar ad market, Randall sees LocaModa’s technology as empowering the consumer. “The users need to be in control of the media around them, not some Orwellian party that decides what they’re going to see,” he says.
But for those born in the pre-Web, pre-blog era, Randall’s vision can seem a bit unnerving. The Facebook connection potentially opens a treasure trove of demographic data about the people who fan, say, Joe’s Bar. That information could be used to persuade potential advertisers that Joe’s customers are their target audience. But, then again, Facebook members can control who can see what about them. “Like the Web, there are definitely horrifying aspects [of the technology] if it’s abused,” Randall says. “And there are really compelling aspects if it’s not abused.”
Those compelling aspects include technology’s power to connect people with similar interests who otherwise might never find each another. You may discover that another customer of Joe’s Bar is also a big fan of Kurt Vonnegut and loves to play chess. Or you may meet people by joining in a communal crossword puzzle on a video screen, be it in a social hall or on a social network.
When he first visited cafes in America, Randall found it odd to see so many people glued to their laptops, rather than taking advantage of the communal experience. He suspected some of them were surfing their social-networking sites, virtually connecting when they could be doing so in reality. “What if you could connect the two?” Randall wondered.
Your might say that Randall is using technology to reinvigorate something that has been going on for thousands of years: conversation. He’s finding new ways to get people talking. And if there is a theme to his life, it is his love of finding new ways to use old things. Back when he was a kid, he would take apart radios and walkie-talkies and reassemble them into something else. His first great passion was composing songs,“ a variation of something that has gone before. ” He studied architecture because his parents told him that he needed “a sensible job,” but dropped out to concentrate on music. He had some success selling his songs to Irish and Brazilian bands, though not “enough for me to retire on.” He grew frustrated with the vagaries of the music business, where marketing, rather than talent, often decided what became a hit. “I don’t like so much of the creative work to be outside of my control,” Randall says.
The music, though, led him to technology. He was intrigued by the music synthesizer, an electronic device that recreates the sounds of all sorts of instruments, even a full orchestra. Randall knew how to play guitar, but not keyboard, which was the only interface at the time for a synthesizer. So, with the help of his music publisher, a venture capitalist, and a technical team, he captained a two-year project that led to the first electronic guitar, called the Stepp guitar after Stephen. While Randall never became astar, the guitar did. It appears on recordings by The Who (played by Peter Townshend), Culture Club, and the Bee Gees. You Tube features an ’80s clip from the BBC of Randall demonstrating the guitar; with big black glasses, he resembles Woody Allen, if you could imagine Allen with wavy, shoulder-length hair (today Randall looks every bit the high-tech exec, with closely cropped hair and skinny, rimless specs). Hanging above the stairs at home in Wellesley is a picture of Prince Philip presenting Randall with a British Design Award for the guitar.
That success “gave me enough knowledge to say that if I have another idea I can actually make it happen,” Randall says. And sure enough, while working on the guitar, he learned about membrane switches, the touch circuitry that is now common on microwave ovens and other consumer devices. “In a flash I thought of a pen computer,” says Randall. “It wasn’t even a term then. ” In the early ’90s, he went on to found one of the companies pioneering the use of pens—another device—for PDAs (personal digital assistants). At the time, he recalls his father, a fashion retailer, being perplexed about what possible purpose the device could serve. Now, his father says “every time I go to a store I sign on one of those things.”
Randall’s work with PDAs led him to smartphones, cell phones with PC-like functions. He founded Symbian, a London-based joint venture by Nokia, Panasonic, Psion, Samsung, Siemens, and Sony Ericsson, to create an operating system for phones that would serve as an alternative to Microsoft’s. But once that company grew to 600 people and sold 200 million licenses in the phone market, Randall grew restless. He likes the adventure of creating things, not running them. And in 2001—jolted by a series of family crises, including his own brush with cancer—he decided he better get a move on. “Are we going to just be passengers on the bus?” he recalls asking his wife. No, they decided. “It was time for my next adventure,” Randall says.
Now that promised word about Randall’s partner of 23 years, Nadia de Lemeny—whom her husband calls “a more interesting character than me. ” Born in California, she spent most of her childhood in Europe. Her father worked for the US government, and her mother, an artist, is French with a White Russian background. Her great uncle Vladimir Roudenko played the future emperor in the epic 1927 French movie Napoléon. De Lemeny was studying acting in London when she spotted Randall in a club. With his long locks,“ he looked like Prince Charming,” she recalls. “I said to my girlfriend that’s the guy I’m going to marry. ”He dazzled her with his mind in general and his electronic guitar in particular—the latter winning them an invite to Paul McCartney’s farm. There, she says, Randall made the mistake of telling a joke. The former Beatle didn’t appreciate being upstaged. “I’m the funny one around here,” he sternly told Randall. “Stephen gulped” and kept quiet for the rest of the visit, de Lemeny says, adding that she doesn’t think McCartney was kidding.
De Lemeny went on to work in British television, as an actress and increasingly as a host. She reviewed movies and interviewed stars, includingMel Gibson and Sylvester Stallone. But her passion was performing, and in Britain she was becoming stereotyped as a presenter.
Both de Lemeny (who retains her maiden name in professional settings) and Randall saw America as a place to recharge their careers. Randall saw the US cell- phone market as a ripe target. He felt that US carriers, with their proprietary software, were behind the times, failing to respond to what consumers wanted. His friends in England thought he was crazy to move. “Everybody was telling me that the US doesn’t get it,” he says. “I was thinking we don’t get the US.”
The couple decided on Wellesley based on a Google search. Randall says they had two criteria: to be close to Route 128,with its technology and venture capital firms, and within a 15-minute drive of a Legal Sea Foods, where they had enjoyed dining. They made the move six years ago. Moving from London to a quiet Boston suburb was a culture shock. De Lemeny recalls early on when the family—their daughter is now 11 and son 6—was walking around town. “People are smiling and saying hello, and we looked around and didn’t realize they were saying hello to us.” She was also taken aback by Wellesley’s affluence: seeing three identically remodeled kitchens within the span of a few weeks and visiting homes professionally decorated for Christmas. “This was so astonishing to me that these women have so much money, but didn’t have any belief in themselves,” she says. At first, she felt like an oddball doing all the decorating herself, but has since found “fabulous friends who feel the same way.”
The Randalls are still renovating their seven-bedroom house, where the original section dates back to 1721. De Lemeny has performed in local theater and co-founded the Contemporary Theatre of Boston, which mounted a play last summer at the Boston Center for the Arts and stages salon theater in people’s homes (including her own last year). She is branching out into podcasting a variety show (her husband calls it a cross between Stephen Colbert and Monty Python) and trying to decide whether to play the wife in a horror flick, I Married a Mutant.
That’s not to say she feels she has married one— though she and Randall could hardly be more different.She’s a “people person”; he’s so wrapped up with his thoughts that his “head literally will hurt” until he can download them into his computer. She writes letters in ink on stationery and holds on to an ancient cell phone; he’s lost without his laptop and iPhone. But she says they complement each other. She’s gotten him to be more social, and he has kept her grounded. When she falls into a funk about the state of the world, he cheers her up with his boundless ideas for the future. “He’s a very positive, optimistic person,” de Lemeny says. Other people might find it daunting to move to a strange town, with no job, few connections, and only a general notion of what they want to do with their careers. But not Randall. “I’m not worried about not having ideas,” he says. “I always do. ”He found a few likeminded people to brainstorm with in Boston.
He says the idea for Wiffiti had its roots in 9/11. He was struck by how people have come to revere Ground Zero. That got him thinking about how people connect to locations. What if people could record their thoughts on a screen at Ground Zero, as well as at other global landmarks like the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem and the Great Wall of China? And as the messages would be sent electronically, they could be posted on the Internet and retained like a time capsule.“ My theory is that the message resonates with the location,” he says.
As an experiment, Randall installed a video screen at the now-closed Someday Café in Somerville’s Davis Square. Visitors used it like a bulletin board, text messaging who they’re voting for, what bands are playing nearby. He also placed a screen in a real estate office that passersby could text message to see different views of a property.
While Randall was wandering around the house and town—thought bubbles popping from his head that stretched from Somerville to Central Asia—his wife decided it was time to give him a shove. Through her children’s school activities, she met Kathy Matt, whose husband, Brian, runs Altitude Inc. (Metrowest Magazine profiled him last fall after his company redesigned Mr. Coffee.) She asked Cathy to help her get her husband out of the house.
Being an idea guy himself, Brian Matt was immediately taken by Randall. “He is everything 2. 0…always looking for a way to break new ground,” Matt says.
For example, when Matt told him about Altitude’s efforts to revitalize Timex, Randall posed the challenge of creating a watch that people would want to wear, perhaps one that could download other watch faces from the Internet and link to a cell phone.
Matt invited Randall to work out of Altitude’s offices, providing him a desk and use of a photocopier and a conference room. Soon it was two desks, then four, then eight—and Matt cut a deal for him to pay rent. Last fall, LocaModa’s 17 employees moved to a two-story building near MIT. Randall eventually found investment capital, but it was harder than he thought it would be. He says East Coast investors are more conservative than those on the West Coast. “Boston is good in investing in the new old thing,” he says. In San Francisco, they’re willing to bet on “the new, new thing.”
Randall likes to tell the story about when he appeared at career day at his daughter’s school. While other parents talked about being lawyers and doctors and financiers, he introduced himself as an inventor. And he took the opportunity to do a little proselytizing, prodding the kids with such questions as: Is it good to make mistakes? Is it good to be stubborn?
At first, they were a bit flummoxed, but they soon caught on. Some talked about their own inventions. A couple of boys told how they made a walking frame for a blind neighbor out of a distance detector from a Lego robot kit. That blew Randall away. “One of the things I’m fascinated about is how creative kids can be, but how creativity can be stifled by the cookie cutter education system that rarely recognizes it,” he says. “People who end up doing what they’re great at are pretty lucky.”
And Randall should know.
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