Scout Electromedia

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

~ the goodbye ~

Scout Electromedia began in San Francisco under the name Scout Electronics. Dan Bomze and William Cockayne founded it together with Geoff Pitfield, who ended up running it, and the founding year is the one fact about the company that nothing reachable will pin down. Wikipedia calls it a late 1990s wireless consumer product company and stops there. It shipped exactly one product.

The Modo was announced on 28 August 2000 and went on sale on 5 September at ninety nine dollars. It was an egg, three and a half inches by two, with a monochrome screen of 105 by 140 pixels and two AAA batteries behind it. No browser, no keyboard. Overnight, over a commercial paging network, it refilled itself with the coming week in whatever city it had been bought in: bars and restaurants with reviews attached, movie times, horoscopes, coupons. IDEO did the industrial design and took an investment in the startup rather than only an invoice, and the software ran on Pixo's operating system, the one that later turned up inside the iPod.

An estimated forty million dollars went in, with a reported twenty million of that spent on advertising. Flatiron Partners and Idealab were the names on the funding, Chase Capital alongside them. Two things had to exist underneath the product for it to mean anything. One was a paging network with coverage across a country. The other was a payroll of writers with opinions about one block of one city. Neither of those was going to appear in Turkey in 2000, where you found out whether a bar was worth the trip by asking somebody who had already been.

Pitfield was fired on 20 October 2000. Four days later the company stopped, and the Modo's service stopped with it, one day before the Los Angeles launch. Eighty four people were working there when it happened.

~ the chronicle ~

~ ninety nine dollars and a pager network ~

It sold through its own website and over the counter at DKNY and Virgin Megastores. There were three colors with names taken off a planetarium wall. The blue one was Neptune and the tribute page's author only ever remembers blue ones for sale in New York; white was Moon and black was Jupiter. His receipt says he paid $107.00 with tax on the first day, at Virgin, and bought three. Stock sold out. How long it was actually buyable is a question the two Wikipedia articles answer differently, one saying the service ran two months across New York and San Francisco, the other saying it shipped in San Francisco for a single day.

Reviews were mixed. On 28 September 2000, two and a half weeks before the end, CNN ran a piece comparing the Modo with Vindigo, which was the same idea written for a PalmPilot. Flatiron had money in that one too.

~ twenty october to twenty four october ~

Pitfield was out on the 20th and the company was done on the 24th, a Tuesday. The device did not fail in the market. There had not been enough market yet for it to fail in, which is the harder version of the same ending to explain to a payroll. Forbes published "Modo.net No More" on 25 October, and Red Herring's account, carried by CNN's money site on the 31st, ran under the headline "Investors left Scout to die".

~ the city that never got one ~

Los Angeles was booked for 25 October and Chicago was supposed to follow. The launch party is said to have gone ahead anyway, the day after the company stopped, because the invoice for it was already settled, and the devices may still have been on shelves in the city that afternoon. Seven months later SFGate used Scout as its example in a piece about what happens to intellectual property when a company closes.

Dennis Crowley put up a Modo tribute page in 2001 and it is still there, seventeen kilobytes of scanned bus-shelter ads and packaging, plus an unopened white Modo he found on eBay in 2004. There are photographs of the painted wall ads at Lafayette and Great Jones and at West Broadway and Broome, both of them painted over by October 2001. One more, at Thompson and West 3rd, he took almost a year after the company went under. People who had worked at Scout found the page and mailed him stickers. Today scoutelectromedia.com returns 114 bytes of placeholder and nothing else, so the advertising outlived the company by a year and the page about the advertising has outlived both by twenty five.

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