I have been thinking about telling the full story of the stylus-driven computer devices, especially what happened during the 1990’s – where from my unique point of view a full chapter of history on this technology has been forgotten, misremembered, and never properly recorded.

Of course, currently I am being driven by the hype and heated rumors of Apple’s upcoming Tablet (just google it)… I’ve seen this hype before, for 20 years as a matter of fact, but never this loud.

Anyway, if you know me, you know I know tablets (and their many other AKAs).
Mobilepoint (e-case)
The word “Tablet” actually would be one of the dumbest names Apple could use and it shows how Microsoft has brainwashed the media.  “Tablet” might have been appropriate 10 years ago when these devices were more than an inch thick, but this is the 21st century.   Besides the fact that the “Tablet PC” has been a grandiose failure – not because it was called a “Tablet”, but because it was using a OS that is meant for desktop PC’s. Big, and fat OS at that.  Putting a little i in front of the word won’t fix the word.  Forget it.

So, anyway,  I came across an inquiry on the google finance board which summarizes the entire wacko world of Internet speculation on these rumors….:

http://finance.google.com/group/google.finance.22144/browse_thread/thread/80c7af8e9b015a30

“Subject: iTablet Aug 9, 7:58 pm
I would like to hear your opinions on what OS you think tablet will
use. Full-fledged Mac OS makes better sense to me, as I would like to
be able to use on it apps like Photoshop,Pages,Numbers,Rhino and
others. But full-fledged Mac OS on it might cannibalize laptop sales.
iPhone Touch OS allows for fast development of many apps, but doesn’t
allow existing desktop graphic, 3D modeling etc. apps. Hybrid? Full
Mac OS with some bridge to iPhone apps? Hmm. Not sure. Then there is
the price. For expected $800 for device I would expect full Mac OS,
not just access to app store apps. Personally, I would be willing to
spend $800 for tablet with full OS, not for limited iPhone Touch like
OS.”

Ignoring the desire for a Mac OS I focused on the word tablet and whipped out this response.

“Well, we know it will be OS X…
The question at a technical level is whether it will be cocoa (as in
Leopard) or cocoa touch (as in iPhone).
It will take a lot of guts on Apple’s part to create a new platform,
but if they do it won’t be called a tablet. I agree, the appstore is
very inviting, especially with a larger and more capable device. I
would guess it will be based on the iPhone OS, and overall won’t be
radically different than the iPhone other than it have a little more
of everything. It will be a challenge not to screw up the user
interface, with a screen slight bigger the thumb won’t be the primary
stylus anymore. Most likely it will be a Personal Communicator class
of device, somewhat smarter than a smart phone, somewhat less desktop
oriented than a Mac. I am also guessing it will be called the iPhone
Pro. You heard it from eddie clay first.”

Yep, “iPhone Pro” makes sense.  Although if Apple had the guts they would resurrect the “iBook”name, but only if it was truly going to be a new platform or at the very least, presented a user interface and organization metaphor beyond the iPhone’s.  More what that might be  (and why you don’t want a “full fledge Mac OS X”) in my next post.

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I wrote this document a decade ago.  It was based on many years of work and many many dollars of investment.  Yes, some will recognize it as looking a lot like PenPoint.  Yes, this was all based on GO and Eo’s technology that had supposedly died in 1995.  It didn’t.  We at Mobilepoint had some success deplying it and making it into a very exciting solution for a specific need: face-to-face…as you saw briefly shown in one of my past video clips.   Ecase was not only based on penpoint, and much of the “in development” work that Go was doing at the time of their sudden death, but also many of the applications that in themselves were revolutionary…whom we also licensed the source code from the ISV (application vendors) before the faded away.  I was tasked to put it all togther gain, port it on existing hardware, and make it more integrated (i.e. make it a whole).

I did all that instead of pursuing Internet startup opportunies that I am embarrass to name….arg.

I still think the concepts of ecase were many years ahead of its time, and only recently has the concepts and technology surpassed it…(yeah, I thinking of the iPhone’s cocoa OS).

ecase1998.pdf>

Here’s some clips from marketing promos we did back then with me giving a brief overview of the technology at the end:

On this blog I am going to talk a lot about Short Messaging and how my favorite sales people use newer and newer solutions based on it.   But first I want to discuss some background, and past work I did… just because.

Like me you may have realized that sometimes the only way to communicate effectively with a teenager, say a 13 year daughter,  is to “Sm-ess” with her.   Yeah I am learning not to mess with her,  she is becoming a tough cookie, but in this case I mean “texting”.

Even if she is in the next room, I find it is less inhibitive to discuss the deep issues, (like “what would you like for dinner?”) by “texting” rather than face-to-face.  No, I don’t dare take a chance of interrupting her listening to “Panic At The Disco” on her iPod while watching Hanna Montana, and risk her wrath upon me.

Anyway, short messaging is everywhere, smart phones make it easy,  I do it all the time on my Mac – it surplaces (surpasses and replaces)  IM & Chat and even email on many occasions.  From Twittering to Facebook status updates, it can be used to and from blogging sites etc.   Its not rude like calling someone, its immediate, yet not rude.  Only Luddites deny now that it is one of life’s necessities.

Wasn’t always that way, especially here in Silicon Valley over 10 years ago, where short messaging was seen as kind of a joke.   Except maybe in vertical industrial applications,  where an oil well in a desert needs to send a status messages to a central station.  But not too much glamour was seen during what was then, the first Internet bubble era.

Awe, but satellites, those are always cool.  So I got into it when I joined in on a project called Leo One.

Leo One was one of the many planned Low-Earth-orbiting satellite systems that almost, but never quite made it off the ground.   Because LEO’s are closed to the earth,  they act like radio towers in the sky.   Only problem is they move (unlike GEO’s which are far away but in stationary orbit).   So you have to have lots of satellites following each other, handing off transmissions to provide continuous coverage.  That’s okay, LEO’s are cheap (relatively) to put into orbit versus GEO’s.

LEO’s had started as satellite phone services, like Iridium and Globalstar.   Back in the early 90’s remember, terrestrial mobile phone systems were hardly ubiquitous, nor did they seamlessly work together across many boundaries….so this seemed like a killer product for almost all mobile professionals.

Besides phones, a wide range of applications were envisioned.  The most ambitious was the idea of putting broadband internet into the sky (does anyone remember Teledesic from a good old boy at Microsoft?)

Another idea was less ambitious, real time short messaging.  One that did make it off the ground was Orbcomm.  Leo One was to be a much more reliable, ubiquitous, and faster version of this.  A 48-satellite constellation providing 24-hour coverage with near real-time operation on a global basis.

So I was tasked with an exciting assignment, research the market requirements of  numerous industrial solutions applicable to Leo One, and define a set of common application interface requirements for service providers reselling the Leo One service.

I came up with a concept called Global SMS. Now think back and remember, in the year 2000  “text messaging” was hardly known here in the USA, much less “SMS”.  But it was big time in Europe.  Guess why?  Yeah, the kids…what we are going through now with the kids text this and that, well, Europe had been in this craze 10 years ago.

Also, vertical applications were already being developed there, like  telematics solutions for Mercedes Benz.   I saw the light.  Didn’t take a genius I thought, so obvious. Until I came home.

To keep a long story short, let me just say this: whats obvious now, wasn’t so then if you don’t see it.  So put your self in a time machine and pretend you have just came back from Europe 10 years ago and now are facing a bunch of brilliant american engineers who say SMS is just a fad, no viability, etc.

I thought different, in fact I thought the whole Leo One effort should have renamed themselves to “Global SMS”, thats how big I thought this was going to be.   Yes, SMS was a technical term, specific to GSM networks in Europe.  One that many here tough was not viable.  So here I am trying to promote a broader SMS technically, but also “Global SMS” as a marketing term.  I thought it was obvious, still is today (even without satellites).

Oh well, eventually years later, the US phone systems began to market “text messaging” and the companies began to understand the need to standardized it among themselves.  Now finally, we can SMS someone easily in Europe without much thought to it.   Also, finally “SMS”, as a marketing term is taking its place here, thank you iphone.

Why is SMS an important technical marketing term?  Because it goes so much farther beyond simply “text messaging” between humans.

Anyway, attached here are PDFs of one of my original papers

global-smsdoc1

and presentations I wrote at the time:

globalsms1

While digging in the shed I found some video and an old website from 1998, explaining Mobilepoint, which was a startup company founded by a very energetic guy named Tim Titus, where I served as VP Of Software Development.   I am proud of the product we made, and the people who were on our team to help do it: e-case.  Mobilepoint eventually moved engineering out of the bay area, and years later went on to develop these “face-to-face” solutions on Windows for the Tablet PC (as oppose to our stuff which IMHO, still is in many ways ahead of its time).  Some day I will tell the world all about the roots of this technology, yes, it is almost as exciting of a story as the pirate story I have been working on telling. You need to keep reading this blog though.

I remember having a lot of passion about this product, maybe it shows, but I almost forgot this video existed until I started cleaning out my shed. Archaeology is sometimes a fulfilling thing.

A version of the website from 1998 is also here. I cleaned up a lot and condensed it but the all vids I could find are there.   Here’s the Youtube version (condensed even more, so it looks like I am the star!):

It was 2001, and I had this vision.  Ha ha, well, based on on some technology we were developing at Deskin Research Group,  a group of brilliant satellite, communications and signal processing engineers (among many other things).

I had no idea at the time, my name for this vision was also the pinnacle song in movie Deep Throat, nor did I foresee that the term “bubble” was about to become a connotation for bad things in the tech industry.  Oh, well, I had fun learning the power of Flash.

The MagicBubble product concept and platform (i2i) generated a lot of excitement within Deskin and for them (they got bought out by some Japanese outfit I heard shortly after the fallout from the bubble burst and 911).   The concept and design was an 802.11 alternative technology and device communications standard (or possibly new proposed standard) using a different part of the spectrum that was then, and is currently being used by what we all know now as WiFi and Bluetooth products. The advantages of the technology allowed for imagining advance solutions perhaps still a dream today…at least not at the low cost we were proposing…

This is a snippet of a much larger presentation (I left the technical part out which may still be propriatary for all I know). The song (maybe the best part)i one of my favs, a band called the plimsouls… I’ll have to get a higher res version up later.  Done in Flash, back then not as powerful as today, but I had a lot of fun doing it.  I had close to a zero budget for multimedia and marketing tools and it was meant for internal use only. Oh yeah, and that cute kid blowing the bubble, that’s my son James.

I think the project actually got bought off by some far east company after I left (gee, that sounds familiar)…

This was done in Flash, the version before Adobe bought Macromedia…I really had fun doing it…I wish I could have continued doing flash development and marketing, however annoying I think flash can be do users these days.