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Mercury Online founder and CEO
John Eisenhauer

   Across the country and even an ocean or two, high-tech signs and kiosks are being controlled from an offbeat Bainbridge Island office, thousands of miles away.
   John Eisenhauer and his staff at Mercury Online Solutions are not mad scientists. They specialize in digital displays that do everything from broadcast news and financial reports to spit out coupons, quotes, mall maps, and event tickets.
   This cutting-edge technology is used by financial institutions, airports, train stations, food courts, malls and schools. Even Las Vegas casinos use them for those splashy reader boards.
   Mercury Online’s clientele consists mainly of retailers. Local residents may have glimpsed one of Eisenhauer’s screens, an eye-popping 12-foot diagonal TV, on display at the Pavilion before it was sold to a buyer in Tokyo.
   Eisenhauer’s biggest client is AT&T Wireless, which has at least one piece of Mercury Online technology in each of its 900 stores across the country. Those kiosks inside that promote AT&T Wireless merchandise and sales are Eisenhauer’s. So are the three-sided product demo areas with touch screens that explain how the items work.

One of the self-contained, computer controlled kiosks the company
sells and maintains.

Mercury Online is a one-stop shop. The company sells and installs the signs and kiosks, then monitors and maintains them from its own computers. If a terminal in a customer’s shop on the East Coast breaks down, Mercury Online can either fix it remotely or immediately alert the business to the problem. That saves the customer from having to station an employee in front of each sign or kiosk.
   “It’s corporately quite embarrassing if you provide technology for someone and it doesn’t work,” observed Eisenhauer.
   It can also get sticky if you’re providing Internet surfing on a terminal and someone surfs over to an X-rated site. Especially if you’re Eisenhauer’s second-largest customer, Disney. But it’s not a problem if your terminals came from Mercury Online, which also monitors them. Disney has Mercury Online technology at seven of its properties, including its café at Inside Disney Quest, a video game room in Orlando. Each table has a computer instead of a jukebox, and Eisenhauer’s staff makes sure all the web surfing is Disney-clean.
   And then there’s the flexibility factor. Mercury Online can change a sign almost immediately, at the customer’s request.
   “Big businesses need to communicate faster than ever,” said Eisenhauer. “It takes 6-8 weeks for a national retailer to get a paper sign made. We can do that in 6-8 hours.”
   Mercury Online has seen steady growth since 1996, when Eisenhauer started out as a one-man show with one $600,000 order. He now has 14 employees, and has achieved more than $10 million worth of sales this year. Despite the gloomy economy, Mercury Online has considerably more than doubled its sales over 2001.
   Creative director Erik Clineschmidt says Mercury Online offers a level of customization that’s rare in the industry.
   “We’re out to provide a quality product for our clients and build a long-term relationship,” he says proudly. “That’s completely different from many of our competitors who want to sell something prepackaged.
   “Most people can’t believe there’s less than 20 of us. We appear to be a very big company.”
   Besides technical know-how, what is the secret to Eisenhauer’s success?
   “We did not do an IPO or bring in any venture capital, it’s just been an organic growth,” says Eisenhauer. “I have had a lifelong and career-long stubbornness about not going public, and about making any money out of sales.”
   Perhaps not surprisingly, Eisenhauer was a math major in college. He got an early start in the computer industry, doing digital animation in the early ‘80s and working as a software entrepreneur since 1982. But Eisenhauer is not all algebra and silicon. He has also worked as an actor, deejay, magician, mime and musician. His latest venture gives him the best of all his worlds.
   Eisenhauer’s appreciation for theater is apparent at his office, where visitors are greeted by a 3-D girl’s head and a tennis shoe that appears to drift in their direction.
   It’s the perfect job, says Eisenhauer: “I wanted to combine drama and technology, and how many ways can you do that?”