Isabella Products

THE GOOD IDEA: One product’s journey from thought to fruition, plus advice on doing it yourself.
By Laura Billingsley

Matthew Growney was feeling guilty He lived in Boston; his parents lived in Chicago, and his mother would often comment that she didn’t feel like she was a grandmother because she never saw her grandchildren. Of course she didn’t really mean it, and the families visited each other as often as they could, but it wasn’t as often as a grandmother would have liked. Growney could email his mother photos, or upload them to some sort of photo-sharing Website, but he knew she wasn’t going to be into checking emails and navigating the Internet.

So one day Growney thought, wouldn’t it be great if he could blast photos in near realtime, almost like an instant message or a text? And wouldn’t it be great if they appeared automatically on a digital frame in his parents’ house? What if there were no distractions: no OS, no browser, no clicking through options, no WiFi to set up and monitor? And just like that, the idea for the Vizit wireless digital photo frame was conceived.

But it would take months of careful gestation before the product was born. Before a complete Vizit could he offered for sale to the public, steps had to be taken and hurdles cleared to bring a new wireless connected device to market. These hurdles are the same ones being faced by developers all around the world, as connected devices become more popular and everyone from your average garage tinkerers to Google tries to get in on the action.

Growney, a former Motorola employee and venture capitalist, would create a new company, lsabella Products (named in honor of his daughter who was the inspiration behind Vizit), as the incubator for his idea. The road he and Isabella followed to develop the Vizit can serve as a basic roadmap for other start-up companies hoping to bring their products to market.

THE SET-UP
Lots of people have good ideas. Lots of people even have great ones. But what separates a mere “good idea” from the multitude and turns it into a real product people are willing to buy? Growney hopes he knows the answer, or at least has some first-rate guesses. As the brain behind the Vizit, he has garnered a lot of attention in an industry where few products make it to market, and even fewer become stars. But Vizit has racked up the accolades, named Best Embedded Mobile Device during the GSMA’s (GSM Association) Embedded Mobile Competition, as well as receiving a 2009 Best 0f What’s New Award from Popular Science magazine. And, Growney himself has been recognized for his efforts, named one of 10 M2M Pioneers in 2010 by the editors of this magazine.

Of course, all this started with Growney’s idea to send photos to his parents 1,000 miles away. As time moved on, his parents felt like they were missing out on special moments with the grandkids, such as seeing their first attempts at walking or the first clay of preschool. “So I thought, wouldn’t it be great if you could create that instant sharing of a moment—or more specifically a photo,” he adds. “It would be great if I took a picture of Isabella, my daughter, on her skis for the first time, and in two minutes it would be on my father’s kitchen island in Chicago.” Vizit would be like a crystal ball providing at glimpse into what was happening across the country.

Growney’s background in business told him this was a good idea, as did the direction of consumer electronics at the time. “The world has created such fervor around frequency and communication,” he says, citing Twitter’s popularity as an instant-communication medium. In addition, Growney knew people who struggled with the task of sharing all their photos with friends and family. “I heard all these stories of people who would create these albums on Photobucket and then they had to email everyone the album and it became such a nightmare for people to organize,” Growney says. He wanted to create a “sandbox-like” single repository where a community of people could have their devices linked to this repository and the sharing was closed and secure. Additionally, people can reply to pictures or forward them to others directly from the frame, without the need to use a computer.

As excited as Growney and Isabella Products were about the idea for the Vizit, there were elements of the process that gave them pause. Specifically it can be extremely difficult to enter the market for consumer electronics hardware. To succeed, Isabella knew it would have to come out with a product that left others in the dust in terms of design and function. In fact, Growney doesn’t even like to say Isabella is making consumer electronics—he sees the company as a trailblazer in the new category of mobile Internet devices, which require connectivity and a slicker user experience.

Growney says, “I think a lot gets lost in the noise of coming out with something more conventional, whereas if you take a page out of Apple’s playbook, their stuff doesn’t look like anybody’s stuff…It’s more of a challenge for a smaller company to try to come up with an iconic hardware design, but I think it’s well worth it. It differentiates you fairly quickly in a world where the category itself is being commoditized.”

THE VISION
Even with a great idea, there is no magic formula to make a device succeed in the market. Of course, it helps if your name is Steve Jobs. But it is more than the Apple name that makes products like the iPhone and iPad a success. These devices have a certain elegance, and an ease of use that makes them seem almost like an extension of the person using them. The Kindle from Amazon is another oft-cited device in this category of fantastic user experiences. With the Kindle, all the connectivity issues and the complexity of the electronics fades into the background, and all a user has to do is select a book to read, and voila—there it is.

lsabella wanted to capture this type of experience with the Vizit, and the company believes the user’s interaction with the product is more important than almost anything else, including price. Vizit retails for $279.99, plus additional fees for cellular data. The basic plan lets users receive approximately 100 photos per month for a $5.99 monthly fee, while the premium plan includes about 1,450 photos a year for a yearly $79.99 fee. Not fixating on a certain price point is Growney’s suggestion for developers hoping to make it with a product of their own.

“My advice would be, stick to developing something that really is going to be an extraordinary experience,” he says. “I wouldn’t worry so much about cost and how much you’re going to charge the customer. People buy a lot of Mercedes and BMWs today. People buy a lot of high-end stuff at fancy department stores. So you don’t have to worry about price, price, price, because the minute that you paint yourself into a price sensitivity box, your imagination and your innovation disappear.”

Growney’s background in venture capital helped him to recognize a good idea when it came to him. He started out as a summer intern for Motorola working on the commodities desk, or as he says, learning how to “hustle parts.” After college, Growney worked in Motorola’s M&A office, and eventually co-founded and was managing director of Motorola Ventures, the company’s corporate venture capital arm. It was here he learned how to be a smart investor working with early-stage start-ups. He says new companies have to “become that shiny object in the water for these larger corporations to take notice of” and to do that, it’s all about having a real value proposition and a blockbuster product.

THE GUTS
To make sure the Vizit was iconic, Isabella brought in people from such pillars of design as Bose, Nike, and Motorola to work on the device. In addition to the products look and feel, Isabella had to decide on the type of connectivity that would bring it to life. “We chose our frame to run on cellular for a couple reasons, the first being we have this vision that everything should be out-of-the-box simple,” Growney says.

The Vizit’s target demographic is what Isabella calls “parents with parents,” or people with their own children who also have parents eager for news and images of the grandkids. Many of these grandparents don’t have WiFi, and aren’t too interested in hooking up cables or programming electronics. “What we felt was the simplest way for you to experience your device was to take it out of the box, press the ‘on’ button, and that’s it. Photos would start to arrive, friends and family of the frame would automatically be paired, so you would automatically be able to pull up your address book on your frame and see the nine family and friends who are friends of the frame who would be able to start sending you photos,” Growney explains. To keep the Vizit secure, users can create a friends and family contact list on VizitMe.com, authorizing these contacts to send photos to the frame.

Using the cellular network (in Vizit’s case AT&T) for connectivity also allowed Isabella to push updates to its frames automatically over the air, with no action required by the user. Indeed, nearly every cellular operator has a division devoted to machine-to-machine and emerging devices. Finally, Growney says cellular is “becoming quite affordable.” The frames do not require 3G connectivity, which Growney says lets them use less data, but still creates a great experience for the user. Vizit takes advantage of cloud computing, which lets information be provided to computers and devices on an on-demand basis. Instead of hogging space on the device, photos are actually stored in the cloud.

With cellular came the need for a cellular module to transmit the information. The module acts as the device’s communications center, sending and receiving data over the network. Choosing a module supplier can be somewhat tricky, given the numerous vendors eager to provide their modules for any new project. According to Growney, lsabella looked for a few things in a module supplier. “We actually chose ours based upon the quality of the team, and the amount of experience they had in M2M, and consumer M2M,” he says, referring to the technology behind the device. lsabella chose Telit Wireless Solutions as its module supplier. Other factors that led to that decision, says Growney, were Telit’s willingness to help with design elements, and its access to a variety of testing environments.

Products that connect to a cellular network must pass a number of testing requirements, including FCC and PTCRB certifications. Telit’s help with pre-testing meant lsabella didn’t waste time and money tweaking a product after it failed at certification.

As with most electronic devices, getting all the components to work perfectly together took a little longer than expected. “We had probably one very significant delay which came down to an engineering issue with performance of our board for certification,” Growney says. In pre-testing, the board had some noise issues the company opted to look into, instead of merely shielding the noise on the board. This caused a delay of several months, but Growney believes it was worth it.

“I think root-causing is important as a younger company because if you have a noisy board or radio or micro or whatever it is, and you just decide to throw a gigantic can over it and shield it, that’s fine except you’re always going to need a giant shield on all your stuff and you’re never going to know really what caused it,” he says.

In the end, Growney says it was “a costly decision,” but one that provided the company with a solution, and “the solution will be portable to the next generation of boards that we design later this year, as well as to our second product later this year.”

THE FUTURE
Vizit officially went on sale in March 2010, and while it’s still too early to say whether it will be a long-term success for Isabella Products, so far the signs are encouraging. Growney says the company sold out its initial production run within 12 days of launch, though acknowledging it was a starting-size run. And Isabella is moving Vizit into more distribution channels and into more markets outside the U.S.

Isabella has also seen what it calls “unintended consequences” from the Vizit launch. In other words, the company has been approached about use cases for the product not originally envisioned by Growney and his team. Two of these are digital signage and home healthcare applications.

So far, it certainly seems like Vizit was a good idea, and Growney and team hope to do it again with new product launches in the next year or so, including another photo-related device later in 2010, and the Fable tablet for children in 2011. While all the details are still being worked out, Fable is designed to allow children to share drawings created on the device with family members across distances, another example of technology bringing people closer together. Or at least that is what Growney and Isabella are hoping for. Grandparents around the world hope so too.

www.ConnectedWorldMag.com
Sept/Oct 2010 Edition
Page 72-75