will be a Personal Communicator, as envisioned in 1993…notice the expandable screen. [link]

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:

I don’t even want to link to the analysts on this subject…about how the iPhone‘s features compare to other smartphone OS’s such as android,  Palms (Pam Pre) and the blackberry’s…Multitasking seems to be the biggest lacking feature on their charts.   This is completely worng….and misses the point.

This is a Phone platform for phones first and foremost, not a general purpose platform.  It could be though, but it isn’t.  This is very similar to what we experienced in the 90′s with personal communicators…we got confused because an OS like Penpoint was so powerful,  we forgot what the "point" really was for the consumer problems to be solved.

Nothing should take away from the user experience at a cost consumers expect from a phone. That is, a spinning beachball, or hourglass is one of most annoying user experiences we can have on a computer, but its totally unacceptable on a phone. What is amazing about the iPhone is it can maintain the phone metaphor while also being a platform for so many general purposes. That’s why we are confused.

Eventually this technology will solve most of the problems that laptops solve (it is OS X after all), and I expect more platforms (e.g. webpads) with different metaphors based on this technology (multi touch) …but a smartphone thats more like a laptop? Microsoft wishes…

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!):