Speaking With RadioMail’s Geoff Goodfellow

Look around at the people who seem to be in touch no matter where they are and you’re likely to discover that they employ a cellular phone together with wireless email. These people seem to respond almost instantly to their customers and colleagues independent of whether they are sitting at their desks or riding a train through the Loop in Chicago. Now look carefully at their email address and you’re likely to discover something common amongst most of them: the radiomail.net domain.

The story behind RadioMail is both interesting and instructive. It’s the story of vision, of opportunity, and of good old-fashioned entrepreneurial drive. And no one tells RadioMail’s story better than it’s energetic chairman and founder Geoff Goodfellow. Recently, I had the pleasure of speaking with him at the company’s headquarters, comfortably nestled in the San Mateo hills.

A Bit of Background

Goodfellow started off by candidly acknowledging that, unlike many of his colleagues, he never had the opportunity to attend college. He added: “And truthfully, I actually dropped out of high school. I never graduated from high school, never did anything with college. I started using computers while in the seventh grade in school on a large time-sharing system.”

Exposed early to the US Department of Defense’s APRANET, the predecessor to today’s hugely popular Internet, Goodfellow wondered why anyone would want to work on little islands of computing without being able to communicate between machines. He recalled: “I very quickly formed the opinion that computers that weren’t connected to one another in the form of a network were about as interesting as televisions that only had a VCR and a camcorder.

(Pull-quote) I very quickly formed the opinion that computers that weren’t connected to one another in the form of a network were about as interesting as televisions that only had a VCR and a camcorder.

“You can go down to the local Blockbuster Video and rent a tape or you can use your camcorder to record and playback your own material. But if you take that television set and plug it into an aerial or a satellite dish, that one connection changes it. I have the same philosophy with respect to computers in that I grew up interacting with people all over the world. At that time, I also ran into the people who built the first packet radio network, done at the University of Hawaii.”

At the time, Goodfellow was working part-time at the Stanford Research Institute, now known as SRI International. He remembered: “In the early days, all the computers there had free accounts where people could dial in. I had gotten a teletype and a 110 baud modem at home, and I got to know the system administrators. They invited me in and gave me keys to the building, along with my own account on the computer.”

The more Goodfellow explored, the more he found his grades deteriorating in high school. Just weeks before graduating, Goodfellow decided to call it quits and leave school. He explained: “I dropped out of high school and accepted a full-time job at SRI as a system and network janitor who was responsible for burping and diapering the mainframes. That exposed me to the people who were building the Aloha network which was also funded by ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency). So in the mid-70’s, I took a trip over to the University of Hawaii, never before having met these guys who were the programmers and janitors of the Aloha Net.”

“They gave me a packet radio which was about half the size of a bread box then. I took my terminal with me and I was able to actually sit on the beach and read and answer my email over the ARPANET wirelessly. I thought that was just the coolest thing ever because I had all this communication, but I didn’t like the fact that when I left my house or SRI I had to leave all that communication behind. I wanted to be able to take it with me and I wanted to be able to do it anywhere.”

A Wireless Pioneer

Goodfellow’s description of the early wireless communicator is somewhat reminiscent of a scene played out on a Florida beach in 1923 where FM pioneer Edwin Armstrong presented his new wife the world’s first portable radio—measuring the size of a small suitcase! Goodfellow concurred: “It was a TI computer that ran at 300 baud. The nice thing was that it allowed me to go anywhere without wires.”

Of course, mobile computing was perhaps the furthest thing from the designer’s mind. Goodfellow agreed: “It was very much a stretch. The purpose of the Aloha Net packet radio system was essentially to bypass of the land line toll network because the inter-island costs were so high for people at other University of Hawaii research laboratories.”

So what made Goodfellow consider mobile communication? He responded: “Two things really influenced me. One was a late 60’s article in Popular Electronics about time-sharing. The other was a 1972 or 1973 article in Popular Science which talked about portable cellular telephones which took, as you know, some 15 years later to get the regulatory problems solved. I always thought that the coolest thing in the world is to be able to have a portable telephone that didn’t bind people to things like walls or office desks or summer cabins. It’s the idea of having this number that you could use everywhere. I just thought it was one of the neatest things. I had to have that.”

Following his dream of the future, Goodfellow felt that it was time to leave the halls of SRI and attempt to influence the world. He recalled: “I moved to Washington DC in 1986 to join a cellular start-up. In the early days of cellular, the Washington area, along with Chicago, had a trial system. I got to know the engineers of the system, and I sat on the committees of the FCC [Federal Communications Commission] and the EIA [Electronic Industry Association], which is now the TIA [Telecommunication Industry Association]. I helped form some of the protocol standards which are used in cellular today.”

The Switch to RadioMail

After co-authoring a paper warning about the very real possibility of cellular fraud—a notion that, according to Goodfellow, was all but dismissed by the various cellular manufacturers and carriers—he returned to California in 1988 to found his own start-up: Anterior Technology. Anterior would later be renamed RadioMail.

What prompted the name change? Goodfellow noted: “I always believe that the best ideas come from your customers. Anterior Technology was so-called because anterior is in the front of, or the edge. I had a friend who had a company named Epilogue Technology and I thought, well, let’s be on the front rather than on the back end. The two most difficult things that one has to do in business is name your company or product and figure out how much to charge for it. But one of our customers in the early days, when we were doing the RadioMail functionality with one-way pagers, came up with this name. I thought this is a great name. So eventually we ended up calling the product RadioMail, and then changed the company name to RadioMail.”

(Pull-quote) Nowadays many people Xerox their notes and FedEx them to a colleague. Goodfellow hopes that a number of these people elect to RadioMail some of that information in the future.

Goodfellow also noted that RadioMail had a pleasant ring to it that might lead customers to start using it as a verb—one of the highest accolades in modern business. Nowadays many people Xerox their notes and FedEx them to a colleague. Goodfellow hopes that a number of these people elect to RadioMail some of that information in the future.

With realistic expectations, Goodfellow set out to build his wireless data service. The first step, however, involved getting the cash flow started. He did this by offering conventional UUCP [UNIX] connections to the Internet. Goodfellow explained: “We wanted a business that would allow us to make money while we slept. So we essentially used that with the Robin Hood business principle—we would take the money from that to put into the wireless business.”

He continued: “In the late 1980’s when we founded Anterior, there were companies that had come along, such as Motorola and NEC, which made small alphanumeric pagers. We got in touch with the phone company and they gave us a link into their paging network. That essentially allowed us to start experimenting with what we called one-way RadioMail. That was a very interesting experience because we found that we ran out of bandwidth with the paging network—people wanted messages longer than several hundred characters. That wasn’t economically feasible for the paging networks to accommodate.”

However, Goodfellow’s timing was right. He noted: “This was about the time when ARDIS was formed by Motorola and IBM pooling their interests. Also RAM [Mobile Data] was starting to come out of the background.”

Getting the Message Out

Through his journalistic connections developed during his congressional testimony in Washington, including John Markoff at the New York Times, Goodfellow was able to attract some attention to his efforts. Markoff wrote a front page article in the business section of the paper and, as Goodfellow noted: “All of a sudden, the phone started to ring off the hook. By the way, the business was running out of my house at the time, with it starting out in one spare bedroom. That was essentially how we bootstrapped RadioMail into the two-way messaging field that it is now on both the RAM and ARDIS networks.”

(Pull-quote) The very first service went commercial in October of 1992 on the RAM network using an HP LX 95 palmtop computer with the first portable small modem for a wireless data networks called the Mobidem from Ericsson GE.

Selling the service in the early days involved leveraging much of the sales forces of the carrier companies themselves. Goodfellow described the early product offering: “The very first service went commercial in October of 1992 on the RAM network using an HP LX 95 palmtop computer with the first portable small modem for a wireless data networks called the Mobidem from Ericsson GE.”

Goodfellow explained how the service worked: “What would happen is the message would come into our switching center—which was built to be scalable on a distributed type of architecture originally built on NeXT workstations—from the Internet. From there, a database would check your subscriber id and route the message to the appropriate computer. That gateway computer, attached to the ARDIS or RAM network, would then attempt to push the message out.”

Goodfellow stressed: “Something that was very important to us in designing this was the notion of push versus pull. You do not have to ask the system for messages, just like you don’t ask your pager for a page. When something is there, it gets pushed out to you proactively. And the gateway was intelligent so it would guarantee delivery, just like Federal Express which doesn’t consider the package delivered until someone signs for it. We developed our own efficient over-the-air protocol that, when the message went into the radio network, wound its way through the labyrinth, and got into the palmtop, had an acknowledgment sent back that said the message had been successfully delivered.”

“From the palmtop, essentially, the reverse process would occur. We call it sessionless or connectionless—there is none of this aspect of a connection. You’re essentially always connected. So we started calling it wire-free or like an off-line service. You’re always off-line. You’re on-line, but you’re off-line. When the palmtop wanted to send a message, the radio checked to see if it was in range and, if not, held the message until such time that it was in range. It automatically detected this and pushed the message out. The radio sent it to the nearest tower and the message would eventually arrive at the RadioMail gateway back in my condominium in Menlo Park. At that point, it would be sent on to wherever it needed to go.”

In describing his contribution to the whole notion of RadioMail, GoodFellow modestly noted that: “What I did basically was to come up with the vision and the architecture very much like a person who architects and designs buildings. I came up with the concept of push delivery with a guarantee while not having to log in and stuff. But I never wrote one line of code. I surrounded myself with people who were expert coders.”

Moving Out of the Apartment

Continuing on this somewhat unconventional story, Goodfellow stepped back to describe the early capitalization of RadioMail. He confided: “I originally started the company with a fifty thousand dollar loan from my parents and we just grew the company based on cash flow from there until March or April of 1993. At that point, there were 25 computers in my house with nine people working there. And there were 50 telephone lines! The only horizontal free space was on top of the toilet seat—things were just stacked all over the place. It was time to put the nerve center in a hermetically sealed environment with backup power supplies, UPSes, and all those things that you want with this type of operation. So, we tried to do the VC [venture capital] route, but the VC’s just didn’t understand the business. And we approached everyone.”

(Pull-quote) At that point (April 1993), there were 25 computers in my house with nine people working there. And there were 50 telephone lines! The only horizontal free space was on top of the toilet seat—things were just stacked all over the place.

As many of you know, venture capitalists look for two major things in an investment: growth opportunity and sustainable competitive advantage. With the spread of wireless communication by the late 1980’s, RadioMail was in good shape concerning the chance for growth. However, VC’s found it difficult to identify the company’s sustainable advantage. Goodfellow recounted that potential investors would tell him that: “this technology that you have really doesn’t have any intellectual property aspects—someone can go out and duplicate it. It was a reasonable concern. And they were absolutely right, but anyone can duplicate just about anything with time and money.”

“The trick is to get out there first and establish a brand name. Ironically, some of these guys were putting money into an Italian restaurant where the intellectual property was the menu. Couldn’t I open another Italian restaurant across the street and have the same menu items? But they were willing to invest in an Italian restaurant that you would think would be easier to duplicate than some technology. I don’t know, it just totally confused me.”

Goodfellow concluded: “It was one of the most frustrating things because the VC community operates in a different space time continuum and law of physics than you and I do. Generally in my life, I’ve always been able to find some level, some knob, some button, some switch somewhere that one could tilt or push and cause a marble to drop, gravity to happen, and finally cause an action. But in the VC community, it doesn’t work like that. It’s a very, very different thing. But finally, Motorola became an investor of RadioMail.”

Goodfellow takes a slightly surprising position with respect to others entering his field. He insisted: “What this industry needs right now is more RadioMails to get more of the message out and create an awareness. After that, we can start fighting over it. With RadioMail, it’s as if we have shelves filled with breakfast cereal, but people don’t even know what a breakfast cereal is. In the case of this wireless stuff, they don’t even know that they need it.”

Goodfellow observed that when direct competition does arrive, you have to differentiate yourself by being responsive.

He noted: “You have to listen to your customers and give them what they want. And how you make it in this business is by basically being faster, better, and cheaper. I also believe that branding is going to be a very important step along with the distribution channels. It’s all about getting out there, building relationships, and getting the name out there so that it becomes a verb. You have to promise what you can deliver, and deliver what you promised. That basically was the premise of the business.”

(Pull-quote) You have to promise what you can deliver, and deliver what you promised. That basically was the premise of the business.

As the first step in marketing, Goodfellow noted that when the cellular industry began, cellular telephones cost several thousand dollars but were justified to lawyers and salespeople as being able to bring in those extra couple of sales. Goodfellow quipped: “Basically they said ‘buy this and you will likely make more money.’ Well, that’s not really what gets an industry started—it’s when you start seeding paranoia. What really gets an industry started is when you get some real estate agent or someone, and he says ‘Gosh, this is really nifty, I think I’ll go and buy one.’ And after he has one, he has another buddy who goes out and buys one, and then a third guy, as so on. They think that they better have one or they’ll be yesterday’s news. At that point price goes out the window.”

Goodfellow continued: “Another great example is the Internet. Several years ago, kids got out of college, arrived in the real world, and asked to be on the Internet as they were in college. Managers asked what the benefits were going to be and how much it was going to cost. At the time, it was very hard to justify but now, people are saying that if they don’t have a World Wide Web address on their business card, an Internet domain name, and an email address, they’re yesterday’s news.”

“So people are saying: ‘get me on the Internet’, and price goes right out the window. This is the phase where we are at now in the [wireless data] industry—we are in the seeding paranoia phase. Just like the early days of cellular phones and the Internet, we attempt to seed it with the techno-junkies and the early adopters who don’t care about the price because it’s a gee-whiz nifty thing to have. It’s going to take a while for the word to spread, to the point where we go into full blossoming paranoia and regular people become paranoid. They’ll say: ‘well he’s got one, and he’s got one, so I better have one.’ It just requires some time.”

Supporting Standards

RadioMail currently operates over three of the major wireless data services in the United States: ARDIS, RAM, and CDPD [Cellular Digital Packet Data]. Goodfellow had opinions of each, however, spoke most forcefully about CDPD. He commented: “I think, it might be too little too late. I think that it was over-hyped and it was long on promise and very short on delivery. I think the real opportunity for the cellular carriers is going to be in the PCS arena.”

Goodfellow also noted that: “To build a network that provides thorough in-building penetration is a much different problem. The original cellular networks were designed for a car-based phone service and not as a portable phone service. So building a network that gives you thorough in-building coverage is a much more significant investment in terms of the number of towers and the density you have to have to reach inside conference rooms, basements, and other places where white collar workers are likely to use these things.”

Goodfellow described how CDPD is designed to enable implementors to leverage their existing base stations and towers. However, he noted that this doesn’t mean that CDPD services are necessarily equal across different regions. Goodfellow explained: “Some put an MDBS at every cell site, while others only put it in several cell sites. So you could essentially claim that something like the San Francisco Bay Area is covered but it is a street level coverage rather than a full in-building level coverage.” “The conclusion that I have come to is that the real opportunity is going to be in PCS [Personal Communications Services]. I believe that this is the case because the PCS carriers, like the cellular carriers, have voice revenues as their bread and butter. That’s what pays for the cell sites and everything. In this model, data is an incremental revenue or gravy opportunity. And when you’re talking about the new style of networks like CDMA and GSM, the data comes on top of that for free. You don’t have to put in an extra $50,000 MDBS, which essentially is a fully separate network.”

(Pull-quote) The conclusion that I have come to is that the real opportunity is going to be in PCS (Personal Communications Services)…In the domestic market (United States), I think that GSM and CDMA are going be the two winners, and the ones to bet on.

Goodfellow predicted: “In the domestic market [United States], I think that GSM and CDMA are going be the two winners, and the ones to bet on. They have a data capability built in, and the platform is more standardized enabling standardized chip sets along with the power of numbers and a revenue base. That is what I believe it’s going to take to make this marketplace take off. And that’s essentially where RadioMail comes in because it ties all the separate networks together. The customers really don’t care about whether it’s TDMA or CDMA or GSM, or this one or that, they just want a solution that works.”

RadioMail in Hong Kong

Mobile professionals are, of course, located everywhere in the world and RadioMail hopes to be there with them. Last year, the company moved into one of the most active wireless markets anywhere on earth—Hong Kong. Goodfellow recounted: “I actually opened up that office. In Asia we think there is a tremendous opportunity in the form of scribble-and-send type of applications, because this alleviates the keyboard problem [with Chinese script]. Here is an excellent type of an opportunity for Newton, for instance, where you could scribble something in Chinese or Japanese and send it to someone.”

Goodfellow continued: “That’s the thing that we just starting to experiment with now in Hong Kong using the Newton. Newton 2.0 is out now but it has taken a lot longer than we expected to get the PCMCIA card and modems in place, so we’re just starting to do that right now. We believe in establishing a bedrock in a place like Hong Kong, getting the formula down, and finding out what works and what doesn’t work. The model is fail, fail, fail, and then build up your strength and your acumen and launch into other Asian countries.”

Of course, Hong Kong is not only next to China, it’ll soon be part of China. Goodfellow acknowledged: “We’re definitely thinking about China. But if you do too much at once, you’ll end up falling over. So you have to do it at a pace that allows you to stand up while you’re learning. It’s just a phenomenal place. It is where the Japanese companies test market their products.”

Free of Wires at Last

Like everyone in the industry, Goodfellow has his set of predictions of when the industry is likely to turn around. He prognosticated: “I think this industry is really going to take off in 1998. I still think we are in the baking stage right now, and it’s really going to happen in 1998. I believe that as more of the PCS and CDMA networks develop and mature, more people will be exposed to this method of communication as a way of transacting their business. I also believe that it will be much more international than it is right now.”

Of course, this isn’t Goodfellow’s first prediction. He recounted that: “we thought back in 1992 that 1995 would be the year. Instead, what we found was that we’re in the [Apple] Lisa phase of the business where the technology is wonder with lots of hype, but it sort of went thud in the marketplace because people did not understand it. Today, we’re looking forward to the Macintosh phase which I believe will come of age in the 1998 time frame.”

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Contact:

Geoff Goodfellow
RadioMail Corp.
Chairman & Founder
2600 Campus Drive
San Mateo, CA 94403
(415) 286-7810
(415) 286-7809 (fax)
[email protected]