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When Jason Hetherington, a 26-year-old exam instructor, was working in Dubai for six months, he often visited wiffiti.com to see what was up at Somerville's Someday Café in Somerville, Massachusetts, his old haunt. “It was a great way to get a taste of what was going on back home,” he says. Stephen Randall, the boss of LocaModa and one of the founders of Symbian, a company that makes software for smartphones, likens the result to a location-based blog. He plans to have sponsored screens capturing “the word on the street” in 10,000 places by 2009.
Some of the messages sent to the screens are remarkably banal, but things occasionally get spicy. In March one woman received a marriage proposal via the Wiffiti screen at Toscanini's café in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What is more, she accepted via Wiffiti—after a mere 29 minutes of contemplation. Although it might seem to make more sense to talk to, rather than text, the person sipping coffee nearby, “people are looking for a way to break the ice,” says Tamara Mendelsohn of Forrester, a consultancy. Furthermore, systems like Wiffiti are “noncommittal—you're not going to face rejection,” she adds.