My name is Matthew McNear. I started C&D Wireless in 2005 to develop an idea that I had for a cell phone. Yes, a certain red phone that strongly resembles an old-fashioned English telephone box.

The London Calling mobile phone was an idea I had while driving down the road. Maybe I had heard a story about how, with the advent of cell phones, those familiar English telephone boxes were rapidly disappearing, and thought how ironic it would be if you combined those two ideas. How you could preserve the classic phone box design in the very object that is responsible for its disappearance.

I can't say for sure if that's exactly how it played out in my mind. But my trusty StarTac was getting a bit dated, and I do recall thinking that it might be really cool if, instead of having a cell phone that just looks like a cell phone, there was one that looked like something else.

I didn't know all that much about cell phones at the beginning - I'm a real estate and finance guy by trade. But this time, I thought it might be neat to actually give this particular crazy idea a try. Maybe I was bored with my career, or maybe I just wanted to feel what it was like to actually make something real.

That's something you never understand back in college, that one day you will be investing a lot of your time and effort to produce leases or analysis reports or financial statements or whatever it is that you do in your particular office job, that in the end are just so much scrap paper. And that after all those years of effort, you don't have something tangible to show for all that effort. That's life in the service economy.

Strange, but it's a Marxist concept, really. Alienation from the product of your labor leaves the individual feeling alienated. Only Marx probably never thought about an economy where there is no product - only paper. But the conclusion is valid - we live in a society where most of us don't know how to make anything. And even if you're a free market guy like me, you still end up feeling that, whatever your resume says, you don't have anything to show for all those years at the office. So you try and fill this void with crafts and home improvement projects or whatever else keeps you busy away from the office. But you still come home every day feeling empty. For me, I chose to fill the void with this project.

Heavy stuff, man. So I was inspired, and I quit my job, and I started figuring out how to do this. You can make your own call, but I think it came out okay. Some men and women leave behind great monuments or works of art. Me, I guess my legacy will be a little red phone.