ePods

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

~ the eulogy ~

The EP1 was built for people who had never owned a computer and were not planning to. I was not that customer. In 1999 I was a teenager in turkey with a machine and a modem, and the thing standing between me and the web was the phone bill, not the fear of a PC. This was an american department store product for an american household that wanted email without the rest of it.

ePods, Inc. started in 1999 in Belltown, Seattle, with Shae Hong as co-founder and chief executive at twenty two years old. The money came from an unlikely place. Salton Inc. of Mount Prospect, Illinois sold the George Foreman grill and the Juiceman, and in january 2000 it put two million dollars of equity into a Seattle internet company and offered its retail channel on top: Macy's and Target, next to the small appliances.

The hardware was a 2.2 pound slab about the size of a magazine, with an 8.2 inch 640 by 480 touchscreen at 256 colors, driven by a stylus and an on screen keyboard. Inside was a 129 megahertz RISC processor with sixteen megabytes of memory and a 56k modem. Microsoft supplied the operating system and the browser, Google supplied the search. All the customer had to bring was a phone line and a power socket, and the monthly fee bought five email accounts and a curated set of web content.

Two prices are on the record and they do not agree. The Seattle Times in january 2000 had it at a tentative $599 with $19.95 a month, shipping in may. The company's own homepage in june 2000 shows the device with a badge on it reading $199 plus monthly service plans, and the figure that got written down afterward as the monthly is $24.99. That is the shape of a product repriced hard on its way to a shelf it barely reached.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

It landed into a category that was about to be a mass grave. 1999 and 2000 produced the i-Opener and 3Com's Audrey, with Sony's eVilla close behind them, all selling the same theory: that there were millions of households who wanted the web without wanting a computer, and who would rent one appliance forever to get it. The theory was not stupid. It was simply beaten by the price of an actual PC falling faster than anyone selling appliances had planned for.

ePods was counting on raising forty to fifty million dollars in a third round before the product shipped. That sentence dates the company precisely. In january 2000 it was an ordinary plan, and by autumn there was nobody left writing checks that size for consumer hardware with a monthly fee attached. The company did not survive the bust, and the EP1 went with it.

~ the funny part ~

Shae Hong crashed twice. After ePods he went into countertop kitchen appliances, and that venture collapsed in 2002 when Amana was bought by Maytag, taking about three million dollars of development with it and half a million of his own family's money. His father, an immigrant entrepreneur from korea, told him not to quit and introduced him to Danny Lavy. The two of them started Sensio in 2003, which grew into a small appliance business worth around $150 million.

So the man who tried to sell the internet through a housewares company ended up selling housewares. Salton was right about its own aisle and wrong about the one it was funding. The EP1 survives in the way this class of hardware usually does, as a cheap Windows CE box that hobbyists kept flashing with other software long after the service behind it stopped answering.

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