LightSurf

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

~ the last words ~

You were never a LightSurf customer. The customers were the companies that owned the networks, and they put their own brands on what they bought, so for eight years this firm carried picture messages for millions of people with no occasion to learn its name. On Sprint the product was called Picture Mail.

Philippe Kahn and Sonia Lee started the company in Santa Cruz in 1998. Kahn arrived with a reputation already made, as the man who had run Borland up in Scotts Valley through the Turbo Pascal years and out the other side. What he brought to this one was narrower and stranger: a working server that could receive a photograph from a telephone, at a moment when almost no telephone could send one. He called that piece Picture Mail, and LightSurf existed to sell it to carriers.

The selling went well for a while. Motorola licensed the platform in February 2000. Sprint signed two years after that and switched picture messaging on across the United States in August 2002, and by April 2004 LightSurf was carrying messages between Sprint and Bell Mobility in Canada, the first time two North American carriers had been wired together that way. VeriSign closed its purchase of the company on 6 April 2005 and paid $279.2 million, all of it in stock. Of that, $224.1 million was booked as goodwill against tangible assets of roughly twenty-seven million.

~ the record ~

~ the photograph ~

On 11 June 1997, in a hospital room, waiting for his daughter Sophie to be born, Kahn wired a cell phone to a digital camera and sent the picture out over the infrastructure he had been building at home for most of a year. It is generally called the first photograph shared from a phone, and in 2016 Time put it in a list of the hundred most influential photographs ever taken. Kahn has been careful about the claim in interviews since, pointing out that other people were putting image sensors into handsets around the same time. What he had that they did not was the other half: somewhere for the picture to go.

The hard part in 1997 was not the lens. A photograph leaving a phone had to land somewhere, in a format the receiving handset could open, on a network designed to carry voice calls and a hundred and sixty characters of text. Kahn spent close to a year on that side of the problem before he had anything to photograph.

~ what the carriers bought ~

The product shipped as the LightSurf 6 Open Standards MMS Platform, a hosted service a carrier could rent instead of build. Its selling point was interoperability: it would take a picture off one manufacturer's handset and deliver it, in a form the far end could actually open, to a subscriber of a different company on a different network. Anybody who used picture messaging in its first years will remember how routinely that failed.

Picture messaging arrived in Turkey as a line on a carrier price list, billed per message, priced high enough to stay a novelty for years. I have no idea whose software was underneath the ones I sent. The carrier owned the brand, and the company that actually moved the file appeared only in a contract.

~ two hours in december ~

For a company whose end nobody announced, the last hours are oddly well documented. The Internet Archive holds an ordinary LightSurf page, the technology press section, captured at 00:15 on 6 December 2006. At 02:29 the same morning it captured the first redirect, with every address on the site answering with a jump to verisign.com. Two hours and thirteen minutes separate those two captures and nothing was archived in between.

The business did not stop that night. VeriSign kept running the messaging operation and sold it on to Syniverse Technologies in 2009. The software and the carrier contracts outlived the brand by three years.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »