Cybiko

» see cybiko.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

american middle-schoolers used cybiko. that was not my crowd. in may 2000 i was fifteen and in ankara, on a 33.6k modem at home with icq running. the idea of a $99 handheld whose pitch was "text other cybiko owners within 100 meters" needed a critical mass of cybiko owners within 100 meters, and that was a north american mall-and-school-hallway equation. the device showed up in a few turkish tech magazines as a novelty. nobody i knew owned one.

what cybiko actually was: a thin plastic slab with a rubber qwerty and a monochrome 160 by 100 screen. a license-free radio did rough peer-to-peer messaging. david yang, the russian entrepreneur behind abbyy finereader, started the project in 1998 in moscow and moved the company to long island for the launch. the development team built around 430 freeware games and apps, distributed through the cy.com web site over a docking pc connection. mp3 playback was an add-on cartridge.

the product hit shelves in may 2000 with a us retail price of around $89 and a 14-year-old demographic. the marketing push put it in toys-r-us next to game boy color. cybiko inc. shipped roughly half a million units by the end of that year on the strength of a christmas season that doubled most expectations. then 2001 happened.

~ the case file ~

~ how it actually worked ~

the radio was the only interesting part of the architecture. cybikos in range of each other formed an ad-hoc mesh that could relay a short message a few hops further than any single radio would carry. the cy.com server tied the whole thing to email when a docked unit could reach a phone line. for a brief window in 2000 you could send an im to a teenager who had never seen a phone bill, by way of a rubber-keyboarded plastic toy and the kid two desks over.

~ what really happened ~

the september 2001 london launch was canceled the week of the september 11 attacks, taking the european rollout off the calendar with it. the dot-com pull-back hit cybiko inc. the same quarter that nokia and motorola pushed sms-capable phones into the teenage price band the device had targeted. by 2002 the radio mesh that needed dense ownership to be useful was being routed around by phones that did not need anyone within 100 meters at all. production wound down through 2003 and never restarted.

~ the long tail ~

yang went back to abbyy, which is still alive as an ocr company. the cybiko name moved through a few homebrew sites and a small enthusiast scene that kept the docking software running on windows xp for as long as windows xp ran. modern collectors sometimes pay for a boxed unit because the device is small enough to put on a shelf and recognizable enough to a y2k crowd that did not own one but watched the ads.

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