They'd cost a dollar and be made of paper. Here's Jim Willard's big idea for a turn-it-on, tear-it-up world.
I.
Andy Rifkin is the guy who put the electronics in Barbie's boobs, an accomplishment that better qualifies him to build a paper computer than you might suppose. A former VP of design at Mattel Media, Rifkin has plenty of experience in mass production of cheap, durable, and tiny electronics, an oeuvre that includes the clever circuitry of Talk With Me Barbie. "You knew they weren't real," he deadpans.
Two weeks before Christmas, and Rifkin is at the nondescript headquarters of an Oldsmar, Florida-based software company called Gorilla Systems, looking at a prototype of the paper computer. Also present is Gorilla president Jonathan Browne, who once collaborated with Rifkin on a talking Winnie the Pooh, and Jim Willard, inventor of the paper computer. The toymakers were introduced to Willard by a mutual friend. Now they're part of an unlikely team assembled to make the paper computer a reality.
"It's incredible, isn't it?" says Willard. "Blows you away."
Well, sort of. The model is only an approximation, but the idea - a computer contained in a thick piece of paper -is pretty amazing. A paper computer. It sounds far-fetched until you think about it - and then you wish you'd thought of it first. This is no perpetual-motion machine. The technology is conceivable to anyone who's used a credit card-sized calculator or gotten one of those annoying Christmas-carol greeting cards: tiny electronic circuitry and a low-cost processor sandwiched between sheets of paper with function keys printed on the top sheet.
Willard considers the potential applications to be limitless: A computer that costs a dollar or two and can be dropped into an envelope, used once and thrown away, or jacked in to a phone line to transmit and receive data - people would line up to buy it. A paper-intensive organization looking to cut labor costs and reduce human error - say, the IRS - could go through a hundred million of the things every year. Take-out menus from restaurant chains, catalog pages that link directly to the retailer, warranty cards, subscription notices - all are possibilities. Big companies looking to replace the PC with low-cost devices, marketers who want the equivalent of a Web page from which customers couldn't click away - all are decent enough target markets for starters.
The model on Browne's desk is wired into his computer for sound, a job that will be handled in production units by a low-cost audio chip capable of delivering telephone-quality playback, but the computer is otherwise self-contained - albeit in a quarter-inch-thick tray - and semifunctional. It's designed as a reader-response card for a magazine - this magazine, actually, as Willard has decidedWired may be his big marketing break. The idea is for the reader to push a button to hear an ad or listen to product info from a sponsor, or to key in a catalog request or even make an electronic purchase.
Willard discussed bundling a sample device into these pages, but ultimately, he said, his team couldn't meet the deadline. The best they could do, according to Rifkin, using off-the-shelf components, conductive ink, and some Chinese factories he's worked with before, is 100,000 of the real deal in six months. (We're waiting.) Cost is also a concern. "Allowing for chips that are about as powerful as the ones in an old Apple IIe and an audio chip but no display, we could do that for under $5 a piece," Rifkin says. "Eventually, we'd get the price down much lower."
Until a low-power display screen is feasible, Rifkin sees uses for the audio-enabled version that include rule checking and prompting for complex forms, including tax forms. "Doing a decision tree on information like that would be easy, and it would make doing the form much simpler," he says. Retailers could distribute mail-in models with small radio-frequency tags to communicate with host systems - you wouldn't even have to open the envelope - or paper computers that connect to a phone for interactive commerce.
Browne's job is to create a simple operating system to handle a limited repertoire of commands and allow the device to exchange information with other computers. To keep costs down - "every 50 cents counts," he says - and to obviate the need for an ISP, the paper computer will not support TCP/IP. Rather than reaching out over the Web, the device will contact a dedicated server by dialing it (ostensibly via a toll-free number) directly. The price and security gains from this dial-up plan, the designers believe, are worth the trade-off on an inability to browse and surf the Web.
Rifkin and Browne are both working for equity in Willard's Paper Computer Corporation, and they both believe there will be a payday. Browne, a large, unprepossessing fellow who in the 1980s ran a Tampa nightspot called the London Victory Club, has a payroll of 40 employees and a new wine-red Porsche to play with - so he isn't looking for ways to waste his time. What he knows about the paper computer has made him seriously interested in the project. "There are so many applications for a computer this inexpensive," he says.
II.
Jim Willard was watering his front yard when he first had the idea for the paper computer. This was five years ago, back when he still had a front yard. It was the place Willard went when he needed to think things over - "staring at the grass," he called it. Maybe if he had that yard today he could walk out there and figure out what the hell to do next.
"Any sane person would have quit a long time ago," says Willard, lighting a Camel and glancing across the table at his wife, Sharen, who doesn't argue the point. We're having lunch on a winter afternoon at a restaurant called the Cuckoo's Nest, in Olney, Maryland, just inside the perimeter of DC sprawl and a few miles from the one-bedroom condo the Willards moved into when they could no longer keep up their house payments. "This is a treat for us," says Sharen shyly. "We used to come here a lot."
These days they eat in. They could soon lose the condo, too, if Jim doesn't get a job. He's been working full-time on this project for years - not drawing a paycheck - and Sharen's salary as a bank functionary only goes so far. They've long since spent their savings, maxed out their credit cards, and cracked open their IRAs, burning through more than a million dollars, all told. Jim's daughters, Christine and Cathy, live in Las Vegas with his first wife, Cheri; he hasn't seen them in three years. Sharen's family thinks he's a bum. "These have been unfun times for the Willards," he says.
But even now, having sacrificed so much to the vision that was supposed to have long since made them rich, Jim and Sharen Willard believe in the paper computer. Isn't it what this endless boomtime is all about - big ideas, new technologies that change everything? Surely the paper computer is such an idea. "I have never felt that I could walk away, because this has too much potential," says Jim, a stocky 47-year-old who could be played in a TV movie by Dennis Franz. "I have great faith in Jim," says Sharen quietly. "He's always said that the first million is mine."
Willard has worked hard to make the vision real. He applied for a patent, which was awarded in 1998. He sold his small defense-contracting company, honed his business plan, and commenced toward the great river of venture capital that has nourished so many entrepreneurs - only to have it recede like a mirage every time. "The deals that looked like they would happen have fallen on their asses," he says.
There have been no development deals with manufacturers, no pilot programs with government agencies - just an endless stream of feedback resembling this tactfully worded refusal from Larry Wolfe, a senior VP at Intuit: "As impressive as the technological promise is," Wolfe wrote after a late-1998 meeting, "we are going to pass on the opportunity."
The problem, as Willard sees it, is that the paper computer is too revolutionary for most people to fully understand. The problem, as just about every other person remotely familiar with the situation sees it, is that Willard has spent his time and energy talking to the wrong people about the wrong things - especially a business plan in which nobody but Willard himself believes. Rather than presenting his idea to the VC royalty on Sand Hill Road - "I should have went a long time ago," he tells me in an email - Willard lunched with small-timers at their Virginia country clubs and piddled away his days on the phone trying to win over federal bureaucrats who don't have the authority to purchase paper clips.
The potential of the technology to render traditional paper forms obsolete has impressed many of the knowledgeable people who have looked at Willard's brainchild, but then they hear what he has in mind. "There may well be some applications for his invention, but there is no market as he understands it," says one IRS official who has heard Willard's pitch. This person, it should be noted, has been recommended to me by Jim Willard as his hottest prospect. The official position of the IRS is that it has no interest in the paper computer and no plans to study it in the future.
Another of Willard's top references, Stephen Daniels, was until January a manager in Oracle's federal-systems business in northern Virginia. Oracle, the self-proclaimed leader of the network-computing movement, has spent years searching for low-cost alternatives to the PC. "Oracle has distanced itself from Jim, in large part over the issue of his business plan," says Daniels. "The technology has the potential to be very useful - but it's going to take somebody with a lot more credibility than he has to get it off the ground."
What Jim Willard wants is to turn his idea into an empire. He understands that his invention is by definition a commodity product, something as mundane as the fork or the ballpoint pen, and he's after far more than a royalty deal. His plan is to get paid as both the middleman and the service provider, to control the network through which his ubiquitous paper computers will communicate. "The killer app is the vertical market," he says. "I want to own the value chain, the connectivity, and the marketing. I want to own the servers." He also has a candidate in mind for CEO of this far-flung enterprise: Jim Willard. "I ran my own company," he adds. "I know how to get things done. Anybody who wants to replace me better have somebody special in mind."
What's more, he wants somebody else to pay for it all. "He wants not just control, but funding up front," says the IRS manager, adding that Willard is also rather impatient. "We have to go through a very specific process in order to purchase technology, and that's not Jim's style. He's certainly not willing to wait for the procurement life cycle to unfold."
Sitting in the Cuckoo's Nest, turned out in a white mock turtleneck and blue blazer, Willard defends his plan. He had the idea; he's done his part. "Time can bear out a vision that other people question. Look at Steve Jobs," he says, pronouncing the surname biblically.
Jobs, of course, has made his various fortunes as a businessman, not as an inventor; and though he may have nearly ruined Apple the first go-around by sticking to a worn-out business model, his guru status stems at least in part from a remarkable ability to reposition the company and learn from its mistakes. Yet Willard looks in the mirror and sees vindication through unswerving dedication to his original vision. He is convinced he knows what he's doing with his grandiose designs. Besides, he says, "I'm in too deep to back out now."
III.
Jim Paul Willard grew up in Dallas, where his dad worked as a night watchman and his mom was a homemaker. "My father got a raise whenever the minimum wage went up," says Willard. There was never much money coming in, but Albert and Willie Marie Willard taught Jim and his older brother, Bill, the value of hard work - which gave Jim a certain confidence. "I believed there was nothing I couldn't do," he says. "It never occurred to me that additional education might provide some beneficial qualifications."
Willard graduated from high school in 1970, hoping for a career in radio or journalism. Instead, possessed of a draft number low enough to make service in the Vietnam-era military all but inevitable, he preemptively enlisted in the Navy. Assigned to the nuclear sub USS Mariano G. Vallejo, Willard became a missile technician, which turned out to be a great career move. With the "Valley Joe" in dry dock for more than a year of his hitch, Willard had time to develop an aptitude for electronics and engineering by earning certificates in a series of courses available to sailors in Virginia Beach, Virginia.
When his tour of duty was complete, Willard found work in the military-contracting business, starting out with a stint as a combat-systems engineer at nearby Newport News Shipbuilding. Over the next several years he followed jobs to Navy towns from San Diego to Newport, Rhode Island, working in software development and project management, logging time with several companies along the way. He met his first wife, Cheri, while playing pool one night in a bar, just before heading out on a long project for Raytheon in the Shah's Iran. Their daughters were born into the boom created by Reagan-era defense budgets.
By 1985, Willard had founded his own systems-development firm, Engineering Sciences Corporation, which worked mostly on Navy contracts. His marriage to Cheri foundered, but in 1991 he married Sharen, a soft-spoken Kentuckian who shared his love of entertaining friends and cooking. Times were good. He was pulling down six figures, living in a four-bedroom home in the Maryland suburbs of DC, chartering weekend boat trips on Chesapeake Bay. Sharen quit her job as an administrative assistant at another defense contractor, preferring to spend her time working in her garden. "They knew how to have a good time, and they did," says friend Miles Allen, a retired Environmental Protection Agency worker who now serves as Willard's unpaid PR man.
It was during these happy years that the concepts that would eventually lead to the paper computer began to gestate in Jim Willard's mind. Some design work he'd done years before for an optometrist friend in San Diego - a half-realized concept for an eyeglass-milling machine - had put in his head the idea that he was an inventor, while geopolitical circumstances were trending badly for his contracting business. "We saw defense budgets starting to get squeezed, so we were looking for a place to grow," says Willard. "Voting was an open market, and very underserved."
Local governments, he saw, relied on clunky, seldom-used voting machines to tally election results. Why not provide them with low-cost computers - even disposable models - to do the job faster and cheaper? Through a second company he started, Votation, Willard tinkered with approaches to the voting business, traveling to meet state officials, writing papers, and attending conferences. For a while it looked like the voting business might take off, but the sclerotic network of elections boards and county supervisors never quite warmed to Willard's proposals. And of course there was the funding issue. Votation stalled.
Then, as he watered his well-tended lawn in the summer of 1995, Willard thought of the paper computer. The idea that would change his life did not spring full-blown from his brow, but was instead a distillation of the problems he'd been working on for years. He was thinking about absentee voters, and it struck him that a disposable PC still didn't eliminate the need for a paper absentee ballot. But what if the paper ballots themselves were computerized? He kept watering the grass. "I stayed out there a long, long time," he says.
As Willard considered the simple technology that would go into such a machine, his vision of the potential market grew. There was no need to limit the paper computer to voting, he thought. You could sell it to anyone who was interested. You could sell millions of them to the same customer, year after year. Finally, he turned off the hose and went inside.
Willard didn't wait for the world to beat a path to his door. ("I wondered what he did while he was at home, but he stayed busy," says Sharen.) Votation morphed into the Paper Computer Corporation, and development and commercialization of the paper computer became his vocation. Engineering Sciences was sold, netting him maybe $50,000 - enough, as he saw it, to tide him over until the first truckload of money rolled in. His initial quarry was venture capital, but VCs were rare in his circle of midlevel government employees and conservative defense-industry managers. "One thing I learned was, never go to lunch with somebody at his country club," he says. "Those guys are always small-timers."
When Willard did get a meeting with Oracle's VC group, he was told the company wouldn't do business with him until he had additional funding in place. There was a message there - funding tends to materialize not for ideas or even products but for business models - but it wasn't being broadcast at a frequency Willard could hear.
His next great hope was the IRS, the world's most insatiable consumer of paper forms, but here, too, Willard could get no traction. Again, he asked for the wrong thing. His pet project, replacing the 1040EZ form with a paper computer, never made much economic sense, since the forms already cost only about $2 each to process, and his plan to take possession of the tax data of millions of Americans on his own servers was always a pipe dream. Intuit told Willard all this quite plainly when he tried to interest the big personal-finance software maker in his invention, but more than a year after receiving the memo from Wolfe, Willard still talks confidently of a deal with the IRS. "We are very close to a pilot project for the EZ form, probably for 40,000 units," he told me in December.
The truth is that Jim Willard has taken to exaggerating his progress when he speaks to industry contacts and reporters, a habit that severely damaged his relationship with individuals at Oracle. "He initially presented himself to me as someone that Oracle had already invested in significantly," says former Oracle exec Stephen Daniels. "He fudged."
The day before my conversation with Daniels, Willard tells me Oracle looks like it's good for $3 million in startup funding. It's a Clintonian take on the facts that seems sadder than it does offensive. After all the hours spent writing white papers and talking on the phone to set up fruitless meetings, after all the flights and hotel rooms he couldn't really afford and all the days at home running together in a blur while the walls of the condo close in on him, he is desperate.
Even his ace in the hole - his patent (#5,764,221) on a computer built from "inexpensive flexible sheet materials to provide a flat framework in which to situate an interconnected combination of electronic components" - does not offer him the assurance of success he hopes it does.
"If there are, say, seven factors that define a product's characteristics, any product that is not the same in even one of those characteristics doesn't violate the patent protection," says Erik Oliver, a patent attorney at Silicon Valley's favorite law firm, Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati.
Meanwhile, researchers at IBM are experimenting with their own version of Willard's invention, layering semiconductors into materials including an acetate-like plastic. The company is leaning toward a more sophisticated display, one that could enable what Lee Green, the executive responsible for IBM's product design, calls an electronic newspaper, a lighter version of today's ebooks. A computer you take into the bathroom. "It won't happen this year, probably, because we're still in the concept-car phase with these new displays," Green says, "but we see something coming out of this that you could roll up and use to smack the dog."
The point is that IBM could market such a device without paying Willard a cent if the design is at all different. And while Willard claims he's ready to file as many as 20 additional patents to protect his idea, the last thing he needs is to start playing dueling lawyers with huge corporations.
IV.
The meeting at Gorilla Systems is an eye-opener for Jon Browne and Andy Rifkin. So far, most of what they know about the paper computer is its technical blueprint. This afternoon in Browne's office, Willard lays out his business plan. The gentle toymakers listen politely, but they are dismayed by what they hear. "He'll get really pissed at me for saying this," Browne confides later, "but our mouths dropped when he said that thing about owning the servers. Adding value and controlling other people's critical information doesn't strike me as necessary or very likely, and insisting on it could stand in the way of success. The more things you have to set up to deploy it - the longer it takes to happen - the less attractive it becomes."
Browne also questions Willard's swing-for-the-bleachers approach to marketing. "I think we've got to start smaller - find some uses to prove to the world that it can be done and then build up to the large contracts, with something like an IRS project as the grand finale," he says.
A test run with a retailer, perhaps paid for out of the retailer's promotional budget, could help determine what works and what doesn't. A restaurant chain like Pizza Hut could distribute reusable paper-computer menus capable of dialing in orders directly to its servers, which would link to a PC at the appropriate outlet to place the order. "It would be great to sell them the system, too, but you couldn't kill the deal over it," says Browne. Closer to Willard's original vision is the possibility of its use by census takers, and even a second look at the voting market, two ideas Intuit's Larry Wolfe has endorsed.
All these measured steps, though, will require Jim Willard to ratchet down his expectations - something that Rifkin, who also allows he is mildly distressed after the meeting at Gorilla Systems, recognizes as a key to the paper computer's future. The experienced product developer has already wrestled with Willard over some design aspects, urging him to build an audio-enabled version of the paper computer today instead of waiting for the development of a display screen or focusing too much on the radio-frequency tags. Now he sees problems on the business side, too. "What scares me a little is that his focus is more narrow than we had discussed," says Rifkin. "The emphasis on the IRS - that sounds like a bad decision."
Still, Rifkin is confident that there are practical solutions to Willard's problems. "There is a process that you go through where you reinvent and the product becomes a new product," he says. "Some of the brightest inventors need to temper their passion with some realism and be reminded that what they've got is just an idea - just one idea. It's not your kid. It's important to get out there and make money on it, and to sell it to a big corporation means giving up control."
Whether Jim Willard can temper his passion with realism is an open question. The paper computer is not just one idea to him - it's his only idea, his main chance.
The night of the meeting in Jon Browne's office, Willard is enjoying some martinis at the bar of a slightly dowdy Tampa Bay hotel, the Safety Harbor Resort and Spa, located at the site of some freshwater springs that, according to local legend, Hernando de Soto once mistook for the Fountain of Youth. Asked if he would sell the paper computer to a company that offered him a lump sum plus royalties on future sales, Willard doesn't hesitate. "If that's what they're offering, they don't understand the business model," he says.
It could be bravado or megalomania or the gin, or perhaps one more attempt to enhance his prospects, but he is adamant. "I would have to say no."
Two weeks later, over lunch at the Cuckoo's Nest, he is asked the same question and repeats the boast. His partners' doubts - unknown to Willard until I share them with him at this moment - do not sway the man. Another venture capital firm is interested, he insists, ignoring clear descriptions on the VC company's Web site indicating that a tight geographic focus on the Bay Area precludes assistance. Jim Willard believes what he wants to believe - Jim Willard. And he says he's willing to keep on going until the paper computer succeeds on the terms he envisions.
It's the first time all day Sharen contradicts him. "I think," she says, "we would have to take the money."
Jim is momentarily deflated by her words. "We'll see," he says. "We'll have to just see."
V.
Six weeks later, Willard is buzzing with new ideas. Maybe the answer - as proposed by some recent acquaintances - is merging into a shell company that trades on the notorious Vancouver Stock Exchange. "I know that has a lousy reputation, but I think these guys sound OK," he says hopefully.
Or maybe the answer is a new venture capitalist he just met with in New York, who not only seems interested in turning the paper computer into a mobile tool built around wireless communications standards but likes the business plan to boot. Or maybe a dummy version that was supposedly slipped to Al Gore's people - who happened to be in Manhattan at the same time - will capture the attention of the Internet-inventing pol.
Whatever the Willards do, they'd better do something fast. Although Jim Willard thinks the big computermakers just don't get ubiquitous computing, the fact is that his brainchild is vulnerable to the coming flood of cheap handheld devices, including cell phones and PDAs, that will be capable of providing Internet access on the fly. Nobody else is talking about putting a single-digit price tag on their edge-of-the-network equipment, but prices are coming down for both hardware and connectivity, making a throwaway computer less attractive. Though several people have pointed all this out to Willard, he remains convinced that his invention is something entirely different.
But in a new economy that values speed to market as a crucial metric of business performance, the paper computer hasn't budged in half a decade. Even if he wasn't running out of money, Jim Willard may be running out of time.
