TIME EUROPE
December 11, 2000, Vol. 156 No. 24
The Master of the Game
Cybiko Mania
By ANDREW MEIER Moscow
His creation may grow to be the bane of teachers and parents worldwide. He has talked AOL's Steve Case into investing, as well as Esther Dyson, doyenne of the Internet. But David Yang remains almost unknown, even though he's the brains behind Cybiko, one of the hottest e-toys in the world.
 |
Black/Toby for TIME
David Yang of Cybiko
| Few kids' playthings have ever been so passionately discussed in the boardrooms of Wall Street. Introduced last April in the U.S., Cybiko has proved a huge hit among American teenagers. Worldwide sales of Cybiko, which retails in the U.S. for $129, could well surpass $50 million this year.
What is Cybiko? "It's a handheld computer," says Yang, "that in contrast to the PalmPilot has multitasking functions and built-in local networking capabilities to combine entertainment with communication." Simply put, Cybiko is a toy, a mobile telephone and a teen personal digital assistant (pda) all in one. Cybikos can go anywhere and, within a radius of 90 m outdoors, two units can converse.
Yang's strategy is simple: build up a massive base of Cybiko users. They can download games, for free, from the website (www.cybiko.com). Since the content is on that site alone, the company will soon have an alluring resource: exclusive access to hundreds of thousands of teenagers around the world.
While reams have been written about Cybiko since its launch, Yang has stayed in the shadows. The company's headquarters in Bloomingdale, Illinois is only a skeleton operation; Cybiko runs on the brains of 180 Russian programmers, engineers and designers sitting in Moscow. While Yang trolled for investors, he deliberately kept the company's Russian roots quiet. In September, however, he hit the money zone when AOL bought a reported 20% stake. With investment secured, Yang is ready to talk.
Born in Yerevan, Armenia's capital, Yang is the Soviet son of a Chinese father and an Armenian mother. Both parents are physicists. Yang spent his first 17 years in Armenia before enrolling in the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of M.I.T. He graduated in 1992, the year after the U.S.S.R. collapsed, with a degree in applied mathematics and physics.
In 1989, while still a student, Yang founded his first software company, ABBYY Software House. Over the next decade, as the former Soviet Union's best and brightest fled to the West, Yang stayed behind and developed ABBYY, which is now a world leader in optical character recognition scanning. All the while, however, he dreamed of developing "a piece of hardware that would connect young people to each other."
Two years ago, he started to build his first Cybiko, using Russian developers and Russian investors. In 1999, he met — naturally, on the Internet — his future partner, veteran electronics executive Don Wisniewski, an American and now Cybiko's president. They launched the company that fall. "David worried that no one would take the toy seriously if they knew it came from Moscow," says George Pachikov, a Russian software designer who serves on Cybiko's board. "To Western venture capitalists, Moscow meant corruption and money laundering — not something so clever and fun as this toy."
Yang still manages Cybiko's design and research side in Moscow, while Wisniewski runs a small management and marketing crew in Bloomingdale. "So far, so great," says Yang, sounding just a bit like one of Cybiko's teenage customers.
This edition's table of contents
TIME Europe home
More stories from TIME Europe and related links
E-mail us at mail@timeatlantic.com
Like what you're reading?
Click here to try 4 FREE ISSUES of TIME
|
|
|
