Short Stuff: iSmell

Two men once had a dream - to add smell to the internet. And they almost gave it to us.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Shorties. There's Chuck,
there's Jerry. I'm Josh. We're all feeling kind of short.
So this is short stuff. I'm feeling a tall are
you sure? Why not? I always feel like I'm six three?
How tall are you? Oh? I used to be five ten.
Now I'm like five nine and a half. Oh wait,
I just realized this is a short stuff. We have

(00:25):
no time for this, shure we do so. By the way,
everyone these uh, I know that when we started releasing these,
they were in the regular stuff you should know feed
on Wednesdays, and then also in a standalone, uh short
ease feed, and I think we just weren't quite sure
how to handle that. And now we're just gonna stop
that other one and just let them live here in

(00:46):
the main feed, right where they've been all along. But
we're gonna send our old little standalone friend out to
pasture and shoot it right. All of which means to
say is, if you are only sub scribed weirdly to
that one thing and not the regular feed, just come
on over and join us on the regular feed. We're

(01:07):
bringing them home, baby, all right. So here's our dirty secret.
As we we talked about this one time in a
single live event that no one listening saw. That's exactly right,
and it was such an interesting little piece of internet
tidbit lower. Yeah, it's so perfect for this it just
cannot be left alone. So yeah, we we decided we

(01:28):
were going to talk about the I smell Little I,
Big smell. That was their slogan. That was so Yeah,
it is like a little lie because it was tied
into that whole like Apple push of the late nineties
early two thousands, when Apple was riding high and untouchable. Yeah,
I guess they didn't. You can't trademark something like that, right,

(01:51):
I guess not because of a little I, because every
everyone or not everyone, But it seems like it's been
co opted since then. Sure there's like I Home does
all their like accessories, and yeah, clearly companies that are
not getting any kind of approval from Apple has that
whole eye thing going on. Yeah, so the I smell
just very simply was a little I guess you would

(02:14):
call it a peripheral, a little device that you would
put on your desk, plug into your computer via USB,
and then when you're browsing the Internet, depending on what
kind of website you would come across, it would squirt
out a cent that matched what you're looking at. Maybe
not I not squirt, maybe more like waft. Oh. It

(02:37):
was probably like a like what do you call those
the little perfume atomizer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, not like one
of those those trick flowers that like they didn't like
squirt some oil onto your face that wouldn't come off
or any You're like, oh, why did I visit Nappa
autoparts dot com? Right right? Glube. So the problem with

(02:59):
it was not what it was or what it did,
because if you stop and think about it, that's that's
pretty awesome, or how it worked. Right, we'll get into
like the nuts and bolt of it. But it was
a revolutionary device, amazing. It's some people say that it
was simply ahead of its time, and then it was
still simply ahead of its time. Other people say that

(03:20):
just from the get go it was ill like the
definition of ill conceived. Yeah, so shall we go back
to the es, Yes, that the dot com bubble was
riding high grunges in in decline. Yeah, it was. If
it's like kind of mid nineties, what was coming out

(03:40):
at what came after grunge. Eminem. Oh, I don't even
know what that is. You know who Eminem is? I
have no idea. Okay, well I was, well it's spelled
out you see E M, I N E m oh
Eminem the the guy, the rapper guy. That's right. Yeah.
I thought that was like M and M was some

(04:02):
sort of style of music that I just didn't know.
Oh no, no, no, you know I'm talking like eminem.
All right, So the dot coms are in full effect,
and if everyone remembers that time, there was just a
lot of money being thrown around all over the place
where any great new Internet related idea for sure. And
I think these guys a pair of dudes named Joel

(04:25):
Bellensen and Dexter Smith who went on to form um
What was the name of their company. I think it
was digit Sense, digit Sense, that's right, Okay. They they
formed digit Sense with twenty million dollars god in um
venture capital. And there's this really great everybody go read
this article. It's a Wired article from and it it

(04:48):
just does a profile of them in their company, and
they have like this venture capitalist dude who's like the
prototype for the Silicon Valley VC guy. It was like
he's the guy, he's the archetype. It's amazing just to
see him appear and be like this, this is the
first guy. He's like patient zero, the original hoodie where

(05:12):
exactly amazing. So these guys UM they got together and
they formed this company called Digitsance, and apparently it was
based on a couple of things they had already they
were they were pretty well off UM having written some
software for genetics databases. Yeah, and this is the nineties, right,
so these guys were one of the few, if not

(05:34):
the first, to do this, so they were set. But
that experience had also kind of given them a um
an awareness of genetics and um digitization, and they realized,
like you can you can code something as as organic
as DNA. And they had that little little bit in

(05:55):
their pipe that they were smoking when they were down
on Miami Beach one day on vacation together and they
started smelling perfumes everywhere, as the legend goes, Yes, so
the story goes, they smelled many different perfume e since
in the air and said, I've got a great idea.
I know how we can lose twenty million dollars of
someone else's money. Digital scenting, which is why they called

(06:19):
their their company dig Sense. Uh. And like you said,
because they already had this sort of genetic h digitizing
things relating to genetics down pat they they I don't think,
had too hard of a time transferring that to the
fact that, uh, we talked about this on our own
on longer stuff you should know is that specific odorant

(06:41):
molecules fit together perfectly with specific proteins attached to olfactory receptors.
In other words, go listen to our episode on smell
precisely right, So you it wasn't the I guess it
would have been the smell one. Yeah. It was either
that or the China's Yes, them probably. So these guys

(07:05):
knew that going into this, or they went and I
think did the research, but they're like, oh, we can
we can work with that. We can take this and
turn it into a digital representation, a digital model of
an odorant. And not only can we do it once,
we can do it thousands of times. So the first
step these guys took was to create, from what I understand,

(07:26):
the world's first database of digitized sense. That you could
go into this database and be like, Okay, here's the
code for gardenia, and you it's this odorant and that
odorant and you put it together. And if you can
basically print out an actual odorant and put them together
into your brain, you will smell guardenia. Even though this

(07:48):
is not from Earth or nature. It's totally digitized. And
that alone, Chuck is like, hats off to these cats
for doing that. But that was step one towards um
digit sense. I smell release. That's right, and we're gonna
take a quick break and come back with the master stroke.
That was step two right after this. All right, so

(08:32):
we're back. The brilliant master stroke that I teased really
was brilliant. And all this was the fact that they
could do the digitizing of scent alone was great. But
they sort of learned just like color combinations, uh, in
order to pump out any smell you wanted to someone
sitting in their cubicle via the Internet, they didn't have
to come up with millions of different smells. They could

(08:55):
lean on those one d and twenty eight primary odorans
and combined him in whatever way they saw fit to
make specific odorance like billions and billions of different sense
just from those hundred and twenty eight primary odorance. It
is really smart. It was, because up to that point,
it's like, Okay, this is a good idea, but how

(09:16):
can you get billions of different scents into a little
desktop peripheral You can't. So the ability to break it
down into just a palette of eight. Now, all of
a sudden, the I smell is starting to become an
actual reality. And from what I remember, they um the
I smell itself was actually kind of cool looking. If

(09:36):
you ask me, it looks like an apple um alien
wind sale or something like that solar sale. But the UM,
I think it the tray heated up the specific odor
and then a fan blew across it, and not only
would it heat up one odorant, it would heat up
you know, different combinations to different degrees, and the wind
that or the fan would blow across it, and then

(09:58):
that's what would waft out of the I smell. That's right.
So you load a web page with pixels that have
those scent instructions. You're on a web page for a
landscaping service, and they decided it's a great idea to
give you the scent of fresh cut grass as you
visit their website or if you're at a travel agent site.
Because this is back then when people still use travel agents,

(10:21):
they would squirt out maybe some coconut and suntan lotion,
but not squirt waft. And basically the idea was to
enrich your Internet experience. Uh cost about two bucks. I
think the cartridges were about fifty but they last months
and months sure, which is you know, that's not a
terrible price for something, not at all? Uh. And it

(10:43):
worked great. They tested it. It worked fine. What they
didn't do was consumer testing, That is, does anyone want
to smell the Internet? No? That was these guys did
so much R and D and so much um. They
were so heads down on the ice all that The
fatal flaw of the whole thing was they didn't stop

(11:04):
to ask themselves do people want this? They just presumed, yes,
this thing is so awesome, it's so revolutionary, and there's
so much development put into it. Of course, everybody's gonna
watch the price tags, right, it doesn't slow down your
web page. The pixels that they created with the sent
information were so efficient. It took up I think two
bytes of space, which is like a se of Google's

(11:27):
tracking pixel. Everything about it it was perfect, but no
one wanted it. It's it was just as plain as
day except for me. I've always wanted one of these. Yeah.
They actually debuted at the two thousand one uh C
e S Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, which is where
all the big products make their splash. Um. Nobody liked it.
Everyone hated it. They never sold a single one, and

(11:51):
twenty million dollars in VC funds went down. The scented drain. Yep,
there was There was at least one prototype, and you
can see pictures of it on the internet, but as
far as anyone knows, that was it. They never built one.
They certainly never sold one. Pretty amazing. And then in
two thousand six, PC World said this is this can't

(12:13):
be forgotten, and they released their list of the twenty
five worse tech products of all time. And believe me,
there's been a lot of worse tech products, but the
I Smell was included on that list and was honored forever. Amazing. Yep,
the I Smell. All right, Well that's it. Yeah, if
you want to get in touch with us, you can

(12:34):
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