A View From Ground Zero: What Captured Attention at the PC Expo
Random notes from last week’s PC Expo trade show here, one of the year’s biggest bashes for the wired industry:
Teaching Aid: Teaching assistant Yonald Chery saw his students taking lousy notes.
If he’d been an instructor at a military academy, maybe he would have yelled at them. But because he was at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he decided to turn his own notes into everyone else’s--in real time.
Chery and some MIT colleagues managed to pull it off, forming closely held Virtual Ink Corp. in Boston with funding from Internet venture capital firm CMGI and others. Their product is a high-tech version of an object seen in every engineering school classroom: a whiteboard.
Last week, Virtual Ink’s “mimio” walked off with top honors from PC Expo, beating 3Com’s e-mail-enabled Palm VII and more than 500 products for PC Week’s best of show and best business computing software awards.
Shipping this month, mimio is a cylindrical unit that weighs 1 1/2 pounds, costs about $500 and attaches by suction cups to the side of a conventional whiteboard. Anything written on the whiteboard with a specially designed pen is transmitted to the unit and then to a PC or laptop linked to it by wire or infrared beam. Thus, a professor’s notes can be instantly transmitted to one or dozens of classroom computers.
Standard electronic whiteboards cost thousands of dollars. Teachers have been especially enthusiastic, said Virtual Ink Chief Executive Greg McHale, but so have a lot of other people: researchers, salesmen--almost anyone required to give a presentation to a roomful of listeners.
“It’s confused our ad people, because what’s our target market? Human beings.”
Coming this fall: a combination with handwriting-recognition software. You draw on the board, and the PC across the room types out an e-mail for you. Coming soon after that: IPO city.
Hottest Items: Virtual Ink’s win underscores a few themes from this year’s PC Expo.
First, it won partially because it was one of a very few new things that were actually new things--not refinements or upgrades of old things. The PalmPilot is better than it was, but not revolutionary.
That goes for all the laptops, kneetops and pinkytops on display too: better resolution, smaller, thinner, faster, sure--but not shocking.
Second, human connections are attracting more interest. Like shared desktops, where, say, a technical-support guy gets your permission and then, as you watch on your computer screen, rearranges your icons or fixes something serious. Such a product was demonstrated by Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Robert Herbold, a keynote speaker.
Finally, the convergence of different applications remains a big deal.
That was evident from the crowd-pleasing demonstration of BellSouth’s BlackBerry system, which rolled out this month and functions as a two-way wireless e-mailer that vibrates when you get a new message.
About $400 and a small monthly fee seems like a pretty good deal, even if you do have to type with your thumbs to input data.
Another favorite was Dragon Systems, which has top-rated voice-recognition programs in an increasing variety of styles. The real mind-blower in its demonstration was dictation that instructed the computer to open its e-mail program, start composing a note to Bob, attach a spreadsheet and a comment, and mail it off.
I’m not important enough to need something like that, but it’s nice to know that if I ever am, it will be waiting for me.
Sure-Fire Draw: Another lesson for doing business on the Net: Free stuff still matters.
The biggest single draw for the 75,000 computer buyers and other attendees was at the keynote address by farm-boy-looking genius-turned-AOL-enthusiast Marc Andreessen, who got famous by giving away Netscape’s Navigator.
The second-largest crowd was around the Novell software display. Their giveaway of red umbrellas drew hundreds of people, despite the clear cerulean sky outside over Manhattan.
Another familiar lesson, illustrated in a new way: Size matters more than style. Microsoft software may be buggy, but it had a recruiting booth for new hires right on the floor.
Andreessen told the throng that even AOL, the wildly successful Internet-for-Anti-Intellectuals, needs to get as simple as a TV set.
It was a little like Albert Einstein telling physicists to get out there and make prettier wave functions, but no matter. The next-generation keyboards from Microsoft and others have keys for e-mail, specific Web sites, whatever. So it is happening.
“There needs to be a shift to building a mass-market consumer appliance that is no different from buying plates at Wal-Mart,” said the inventor of the browser.
Other themes: flat-panel displays; video equipment that meshes better with computers; and Linux, Linux, Linux.
Ed Batewell, a manager pushing to get the free operating system offered on computers made by his employer, Global Computer Supplies, said his favorite discovery was Atipa. The small company provides tools that let a user run Linux while keeping Windows on life support.
“It lets you essentially run Windows in a Window. You don’t lose your Windows apps,” Batewell said. “I’m not thrilled with Windows, but at least I know what I’m doing.”
Whipping Boy: The fact that none of the three keynote speakers came from a hardware company says something about the computer industry’s current insecurity. (Besides Andreessen and Herbold, Adobe Systems co-founder and co-Chairman Charles Geschke addressed PC Expo.)
Which may have been demonstrated most profoundly by everybody’s favorite whipping boy, No. 1 PC maker Compaq Computer.
Compaq, which is losing money because of rivals’ leaner business models and its own missteps, had few executives on hand to meet the press, customers or analysts, unlike Dell and IBM.
But it may have had more glitzed-out real estate on the convention floor than any other company.
And it had a black-and-red clad troupe of dancers, who sang: “We’re the Internet experts!” to a largely stunned and disbelieving audience.
Even at a convention that merged the worst bits of your neighborhood office store and Disneyland, that really stood out.
