If you are looking for the last release of the software for the Big Island Communications YoYo product, go here.

Big Island Communications was the first, last, and only start up company where I was in from nearly day one until the last day of hope.  

I was one of the first out the door on the last day of hope, though some people hung around for up to two years after that, but there was no real hope, just the allure of being in control of a set of products, no matter how small the market for them.

Big Island was founded by one of the founders of Global Village, Derrick "Rick" Miley.  Rick is a very smart guy and can really motivate people.  Working for Rick when things are going well is a pleasure.

Big Island was staffed up with people who Rick had picked out from his past time at Global Village and SuperMac.

This startup was much different from Global Village.  Global Village started on a shoestring and could barely cope with success when it came, as the infrastructure for selling to and supporting tens of thousands of customs had to be put into place after there were already tens of thousands of customers.

Big Island started out by preparing to deal with tens of thousands of customers, so as to avoid the crisis that was faced at Global Village.  Big Island never had even ten thousand customers, much less tens of thousands.  The weight of the infrastructure caused the collapse of the company in August/September 1997.

After the collapse, a small core of people stayed on, only getting paid once in a while, trying to make a product that would, eventually, bring in those customers.

Big Island officially ceased to have hope when Ameritech bought U.S. West, Big Island's only customer, and killed the deal that had been forged.

Big Island had two products, the YoYo and the BoogieBoard.

The YoYo was a caller ID box for your computer.  They would allow you to collect caller ID on your computer, play sounds based on who was calling, and block your phone from ringing based on caller ID.  It could also act as a dialer, it could page you with the caller ID of people who had called you (name and number if you had an alphanumeric pager), and could tell you if you had messages waiting if you used the phone company voice mail.

The YoYo was one of those products that a lot of people got very excited about when the heard about it, but that never quite did exactly what they wanted. There was always some feature that, if only we had it, we would sell a million. But if we put all those features in, the box would cost $500 and nobody would buy it.

The paging features were easily the feature that customers wanted most.  However, when developing the product, we convinced ourselves that the feature of associating and playing sounds depending on the incoming caller ID would be the big draw, and we worked most on this, leaving paging pretty bare in our first releases.  In reality, I don't think anybody ever used those damn sounds. 

Our initial, and only, ad featured the tag line, in giant type, "Make your mother-in-law sound like a pig or a cow!"  Not only did this not attract very many buyers, but it won us a second place award from some woman's magazine on the list of most misogynistic
advertisements of the year.  I think first place featured an actual inducement to commit rape and appeared only in some very low circulation magazine with a very small audience. We, on the other hand, were in a dozen computer magazines.  Joy!

The BoogieBoard, the dream of the company, was an ISDN product with a bunch of very cool features.  This is what Big Island was really formed to make, the YoYo being something of a starter project to get funding and start some cash flow.

That we should do an ISDN product was based on some analysis that modem speeds were going to be capped at 56K and that the only way to get more speed out of the existing infrastructure was to go to ISDN.  Modems were selling in huge numbers and it was felt that ISDN would take off in the same way.

This turned out to be wrong.

The main culprit was the phone companies.  They were pissed off that back in the late 60's they came up with this idea of flat rate local area calling.  It was fine as long as most people only spent a couple of minutes on the phone every night, but now the
internet was here in a big way and people were on their modems for hours at a stretch. The network couldn't handle it, but the phone company could dump the flat rate plan and change to measured rate because the customers would never allow it.

(If you lived in Sunnyvale/Mountain View in 1997, you may remember a few cases of not being able to get dial tone around 8pm in the evening because so many people were logging on to the internet and staying logged on.)

So here comes ISDN.  There is no past history of flat rate service, so the phone company decided that ISDN would be measured rate only, and to hell with the customer.

So the customer has to decide if he wants to connect at, say, 46Kbps on his analog modem for a flat monthly rate, or connect at 64Kbps, but have to pay by the minute.

So there was no mass movement to ISDN, even after local governments made the phone company off a flat rate for the initial 200 hours of night/evening/weekend time.

Of course, a lot of people still did want ISDN, but the phone company initially made getting ISDN installed such a chore that a lot of people who might have ordered ISDN never did due to the horror stories.

And, even if you ignored the horror stories and didn't mind the measured rate status, there was no guarantee you could even get ISDN.  The phone company was not ready in terms of upgraded switches or in crews trained to install it.

So the BoogieBoard, with all of its cool features, including all of the things the YoYo could do, died quietly with very few customers.

So it goes.