Pokemon may be passe, but the nation's children will keep snapping up toys made by Japanese companies like Takara, Bandai and Tomy. That, at least, is the thinking of Donald Wisniewski, who hopes to ride the popularity of Japanese-sounding names to help sell the Cybiko, a pocket organizer and wireless communicator that almost every youngster seems to want.
Children, especially 10 to 14-year-olds, use Cybikos to send messages to one another, to play games and to download pictures of rock stars. The devices have even found their way into schools, where many teachers are limiting their use to the playground, next to games of kickball and four-square.
If you happen by the headquarters of Cybiko Inc here, you can see the company P.T. Cruiser in the parking lot, its lime green body emblazoned with pictures of brightly colored Cybikos and smiling faces. Children are likely to hear about them by word of mouth or in commercials on the Internet that use a voice spouting Japanese from the background.
But Wisniewski, 40, the president of Cybiko (pronounced SIE-bi-ko), readily acknowledges that he has no Japanese partners or investors. The company, privately held, does not even have offices in Japan. It is all a marketing ploy.
"It's part of the feel we want the company to have," he said.
"The kids like the name," Wisniewski added in an interview at his office here, about 50km west of Chicago. "It sounds like something that they want to play -- some high-tech gadget out of Asia."
Though Cybiko has only three offices and 172 employees, it is something of a global company. While manufacturing takes place in Taiwan, much of the research and development is done in a three-story building in Moscow. There, about 150 Russian computer engineering designers create technology for the Cybiko, which children are also adopting as a version of their parents' personal digital assistants, like the Palm.
Running the show
The company's founder, David Yang, is one of the most successful Internet technology entrepreneurs in Russia, and he runs the show in Moscow. Yang, 32, a Chinese-Armenian who started a software concern, Abbyy, in 1989 and graduated from the Moscow Physical Technical Institute in 1992, says the business plan makes perfect sense. Where else but Russia, he asks, can you start a company, hire 80 programmers and designers and produce a prototype for a communication device in less than a year for under US$150,000?
While start-up costs are lower in Russia, Yang says, Cybiko's Russian roots initially scared off some early investors. "It was a new company, and they were concerned about Russia and development," he said. "We didn't have anybody in the US, and they were worried."
In September 2000, Cybiko caught the eye of investors like America Online, soon to be AOL Time Warner, which now owns 20 to 30 percent of the company -- it would not say the exact amount.
But in 1998, a year before Stephen M. Case, AOL's chairman, listened to a pitch about a wireless hand-held device that could send instant messages free over short-range radio, Yang's idea was germinating. He dreamed up the Cybiko while recovering from a bad cold at a Moscow hospital. By year-end, with only US$120,000 in seed money, he had gathered a staff of 10.
Six months later, it created a working prototype, and the number of workers was up to 80. Only then did Yang meet Wisniewski. Surfing the Web, the two men had happened upon the same technology bulletin board where the topic of discussion was personal digital assistants and how to make them more efficient and affordable. Soon they were exchanging e-mail messages. Both men felt that they had found the way to create a product for a niche market. After more e-mail, phone conversations and business plans, they met in Manhattan in search of venture capital.
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