Modeshift

Welcome to Mode Shift, a new blog that chronicles accelerating transition in two arenas of American life: the economy and competitiveness of state and metropolitan regions, and the swift development of social media. The focus is new forms, new techniques, the new rules of the game  in economic development and communications. I’m interested in change and how people respond to it. Never has change occurred as fast as it is today. I’m intent on applying to Mode Shift’s reporting and commentary nearly 30 years of accumulated knowledge and experience in writing about technology, government, business, transportation, agriculture and the environment. This blog, in short, is about evolution. And that also applies to the career of its producer, a journalist and public policy specialist, a non-profit executive and grass roots organizer, a smart and lovable guy who was raised on the East Coast, educated in the Mid-Atlantic, and lived in the Deep South, the West Coast, and Washington, D.C., before alighting here on the northern coast of Lake Michigan. 

There are innumerable ways to start Mode Shift, but the most appropriate is to begin in Buckfield, Maine, a cross road town in the woods about 80 minutes north of Portland. Buckfield’s been around since the early part of the 18th century. Still it’s entirely safe to note that never in the hamlet’s history has it encountered anyone quite like Fritz Grobe. I met Fritz last week at the door to his home, which is easy to find on North Buckfield Road. It’s the one with the rows of empty 2-litre bottles of Diet Coke on the stoop.

You probably never heard of Fritz, even though in the early 1990s, when he was in his 20’s, Fritz won five gold medals in international juggling competitions. And if you haven’t heard of Fritz, you certainly never heard of his partner, Stephen Voltz, a 49-year-old lawyer who practiced in Massachusetts before striking it big with Fritz last summer in the world of viral video. Still, you may have seen “Experiment 137,” the video Fritz and Stephen (Fritz on left, Stephen on right in pix) produced to explore in frothy glory what happens when Diet Coke and Mentos mints mix. Last summer, on June 3, Fritz and Stephen completed their new EepyBird.com Web site and posted Experiment 137. Stephen then emailed his younger brother, David Voltz, who lives in San Francisco, to tell him about the site and the video. David emailed a friend, who emailed another friend, and before the end of the day the video was posted to Fark.com, an influential Web agregator site, and Eepybird.com had 14,000 page views. On its first day.

The next day someone posted Experiment 137 to Slashdot.org, an important technology site, and tens of thousands more viewers tapped into the video. On Monday, a producer who’d seen the video on a German technology site, called from the David Letterman Show and invited the EepyBird duo to perform on national television. Their lives haven’t been the same since, nor has the infant business of selling entertainment on the Internet. A full account of EepyBird’s contribution to the online entertainment space appears in the February 20, 2007 edition of the New York Times, which sent me to Buckfield.