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Peace, love and interactive media
By: Roberta Holland, Boston Business Journal (Feb 16, 1999)
WINCHESTER- If you've been in a museum before, you've probably used something built by Museum Technology Source Inc.
The Winchester-based company makes electronic devices that allow museum patrons to play a video at the touch of a button or use motion detectors to start interactive exhibits.
Now the company is branching out with a new product that takes captioning typically printed along the bottom of a television screen and puts it in a separate box. The result: bigger, easier to read print and unobscured pictures on the screen.
Museum Technology Source has seven full-time employees. The company was originally incorporated in 1990, but the owners Michael and Adrienne Callahan did not take it full time until five years ago.
The self-financed, privately held company had annual sales of about $500,000 in 1998.
With the addition of the captioning board, Michael and Adrienne Callahan expect to take in $750,000 in 1999 and $1 million in 2000.
Michael Callahan, 54, started tinkering with electronics as a child growing up in San Francisco. His knowledge of electronics and interest in sound and music led him to collaborate with the city's beat poets in the 1960s. Friends led him east to Woodstock, N.Y., where he started designing slide projector controls and strobe lights for dance floors and other commercial uses.
"We had done a number of dance floors in New York," Michael Callahan said. "It was not terribly gratifying work. If there's anything draggier than a discotheque, its a discotheque owner."
In 1967, Callahan was introduced to some people associated with Harvard University, including Adrienne, who was working for a professor. The group was looking to start a company related to new media technologies and Intermedia Systems Corp. was born in Cambridge.
Intermedia handled some of the management and administrative details for the legendary Woodstock festival in 1969, and the following year the company went public. Adrienne and Michael got married in 1972, and both left the company around that time.
In 1977, Michael Callahan took a job at Harvard University's Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, serving as supervisor of the undergraduate filmmaking program and consulting on the side for museums looking to incorporate electronic media into exhibits.
Callahan quit Harvard five years ago when the consulting and manufacturing business had grown too large for him to continue on a part-time basis. Adrienne Callahan signed on full-time three years ago. Local museums they have worked with include the Children's Museum of Boston and the Museum of Science.
The control devices are manufactured by a contractor, Custom Manufacturing Services in Nashua, N.H. The Callahans try to include every cord or cable a museum would need so it works right out of the box. Control devices range from $400 to $800, and can be reused in various exhibits.
"Some are easier to use than a microwave," said Adrienne Callahan, 55.
The captioning board was prompted by a call from an employee of the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., asking if the company made a device that would take captions and put them on a separate screen so the words didn't obscure the picture. At first Callahan expected to invent the captioning board in a number of months.
"This was one of the most challenging projects I ever worked on," he said. "It wasn't any six months. It was three years of pretty intense development."
Every captioning board has 4,480 tiny lights and five computers to spell out the words. Most are two feet in length to line up with a typical 25-inch monitor. Right now, the boards sell for $3,000, which will probably drop now that the company has started mass production.
About 200 of the captioning boards are in use around the country. Customers include Sea World in San Diego, Universal Studios in Florida and the National Park Service, which just installed its latest board at the Jefferson Memorial in Washington.
"The reason we use them is because we have both an obligation and a real desire to serve all our visitors," said Eric Epstein, audio visual technical director for the National Park Service's Interpretive Design Center in Harpers Ferry, W. VA. "Traditional methods of captioning are distracting and interfere with the images. We go through a lot of energy and expense to make the best-looking images we can."
Epstein said the park service has about 10 captioning boards in place, with plans to install others at the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island and other locations.
"If people are going to comply with ADA regulations for access, this is I think the best solution for visual media," Epstein said.
The Strong Museum in Rochester, N.Y. has been using one of the boards in its popular Sesame Street exhibit. Fred Shroyer, director of exhibits, said the captioning board is below a 10-foot screen that shows episodes of Sesame Street. The board allows the hearing impaired to read the words. Children have used it to sing along with songs.
"We wanted the feel of a theater, but also to have captioning there," Shroyer said.
"I'm very proud of this," Michael Callahan said. "It's a lot more gratifying. A lot of what the 60s was about was inclusion because it allows more people to participate."
He added with a grin, "We're not making bombs."
Michael Callahan and Adrienne Callahan of Winchester-based Museum Technology Source Inc. have a product that provides captioning in a separate box below a picture screen that they believe will elevate the company's sales to $750,000 this year and $1 million by 2000. |
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