"Mark Bergman, investor relations. As a side note, I was also told that Alex Kankaris, designer of the new Xybernaut website, was also floating around, but I didn't meet him."
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WEARABLE GEAR NEWS UPDATE
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12/17/98
Site News & Feedback --- Notes From the Editor
(Reprinted from WearableGear Review #4)
As we mentioned on the site already, the Diamond Rio MP3 review was a HUGE hit. The review was reprinted on MP3.com, one of the most popular music sites on the net. Our traffic increased exponentially for several days and now is remaining at a level about 3 times previous normal traffic. Our FREE subscriber list has also grown tremendously. Hopefully in the next couple months we will be able to get a hold of the Samsung, Saehan and Creative MP3 players for you MP3 hardware fanatics.
Speaking of MP3, a few readers have noted that we are devoting a lot of attention to the new digital music format and players and not as much to other wearable devices. Don't worry--we aren't skimping on other wearable news, we always post what we have. MP3 has been particularly hot lately and we've had several MP3 "scoops", so it's been in the headlines at WearableGear. New readers from the MP3 community: sit back, relax and read about all the wearable computing stuff you've been missing! MP3 portables are just the tip of the iceberg of PC-related wearable gear.
On another note, we are always looking for relevant news, press releases, tips, opinions, features, photos etc. Get some publicity for your ideas, website, company, etc. Remember we are interested in a broad range of technology including wearable computers, voice recognition, wireless products, displays, MP3, embedded processing...use your imagination. feedback@wearablegear.com
Our Products and Research pages are going to be updated again very soon and will include photos, more links and a slightly different layout...so keep an eye out.
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A lot of computer news related sites are BORING. In an effort to liven things up a bit and be a little different we have added to the front page the TopSong.com MP3 Daily Music Link, which spotlights an MP3 song or link each day.
Yahoo recently gave WearableGear.com a pair of sunglasses next to our link in the Wearable Computer part of the directory--it means our site has been personally reviewed by a Yahoo surfer and is one of the best sites in it's category.
Tip
WearableGear.com can be accessed under the domain names "topwww.com" and "topsong.com".
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Notes From the Editor
The Ultimate Wearable, Part 1: Some Ideas
When I tell somebody I am the editor of WearableGear.com, they often looked puzzled and respond with something like "Warble what?" Then I tell them soon they will be wearing a small Walkman-like computer on their hip able to play music, access the internet, call home, use voice recognition, automatically compare prices of a product with net stores and nearby retail outlets, etc. That leads to a different strange look, an almost comical stare reserved for Star Trek convention attendees and "crackpot" inventors. Perhaps it's deserved. But are wearables like this such a stretch of the imagination? Readers of WearableGear.com know that recent news on a variety of fronts suggests otherwise
--Small wireless phones and pagers are performing many computer-like tasks including browsing the web, retrieving email and storing data like addresses, and phone numbers. I've noticed Samsung makes several interesting products (http://www.samsung.com/products/pcs.html): Samsung's SRP-8000 2-way pager can send or receive messages from telephones, email, PCs, the internet etc. The SPH-6000 mobile CDMA phone has a memory chip capable of recording conversations and another Samsung phone let's you say a person's name and it will automatically dial the number! They also have Infomobile, wireless phone/computing device similar to Qualcomm's pdQ (see below).
--Researchers are designing small mobile viewing technologies like the Kopin Cyberdisplay and the Motorola VirtuoVue Virtual Display which greatly increase the amount of viewable data without draining as much battery power as a laptop or palmtop computer.
--Wireless phones are getting smaller and communications technology is being condensed onto a single embedded chip in the laboratory.
--The amount of storage for small devices is increasing dramatically. For example, IBM's Microdrive is the size of a quarter and will hold 350MB of data, including voice recognition and other computing software, data and even MP3 music. Static flash memory will be getting better too.
--MP3 portables will continue to extend the desktop computer by playing music/computer MP3 files wherever you go in an extremely small wearable device. Other features such as voice recording and data storage are being added by MP3 portable maker Saehan Information systems.
Why can't all or some of these features be integrated on one device in the next couple years?
Take a look at the smallest Motorola or Qualcomm wireless phone and place it top to bottom alongside a Rio MP3 player. Better yet, tape them together. Now you have an MP3 portable/cell phone about the same size as a cell phone from a few years ago. Granted it is a pricey MP3 portable/cell, but my point is that the technology is here, we consumers only have to wait for the price to come down. Meanwhile wearable computer makers like Xybernaut and ViA will be catering to the corporate and government crowd who don't mind shelling out $3-5,000 for each state-of-the-art wearable capable of wireless communication and fully-functional Wintel computing. Researchers and academia at places like MIT will continue to push the tech envelope...
...I recently stopped by the first San Diego Telecom Association meeting which was held to a standing-room only audience of about 500 telecom industry invitees and media in Torrey Pines. I was looking for the Qualcomm pdQ smart phone, and it took a while to find but I was not disappointed. The meeting reinforced my belief that smart-phones will compete with other wearable and handheld computing devices.
The featured speaker for the evening was Irwin Jacobs, the founder/CEO of Qualcomm and contributor to many important advances in wireless communications. Jacobs is a legend in the San Diego tech community not only because of his huge success with Qualcomm but also because employees from his first company, LINKABIT, have spawned 33 telecom-related companies in the San Diego area, making San Diego truly a telecommunications capital of the world. Jacobs spoke a lot about the history of telecom and his companies but when he got to the future of the industry he held up Qualcomm's revolutionary new pdQ phone, a hybrid of a Palm computer and a Qualcomm phone, in effect a wearable computer.
The pdQ integrates computing features with wireless CDMA technology: you can make calls and dial direct from the address book displayed on a small palm-top-sized screen, exchange data with a personal computer, browse and store email, transfer information such as business cards between palmtops and smartphones through a wireless infrared port, and even browse the web. It would be nice if the phone had voice recognition, but it's not quite there yet.
Qualcomm's founder appears to view the future of telecom (at least one facet) converging with portable/wearable computing. Keep in mind Qualcomm recently teamed up with Microsoft to create a joint venture, WirelessKnowledge which will further integrate computing and telecom products...
...Xybernaut's latest patents on wearable computers give away some clues to their vision of the wearable future "and wherein said hands-free activating means is selected from the group consisting of audio activation means, eye-tracking activation means, electroencephalography activation means and mixtures there of... hands-free activating means comprises means for recognizing a converted electrical signal from an eye-tracking device, said eye-tracking device comprising means for placing said eye-tracking device in visual contact with a user, means for determining the center of the user's eye pupil, means to determine a point on a display where the user is looking, said means to electrically transmit information obtained to said computer housing...electroencephalography activation means, and activation means responsive to electrical signals from muscles in the head area, working in concert... and mixtures thereof acting in combination with head and arm tracking means to control computer output."...
...While digging through various wearable computer patents I noticed a couple other unique patents. The US Army has patent "US5649061 Device and method for estimating a mental decision" which is "a device and method for estimating a mental decision to select a visual cue from the viewer's eye fixation and corresponding single event evoked cerebral potential...The artificial neural network is trained off-line prior to application to represent the mental decisions of the viewer".
A smart-phone computing patent "US5189632 Portable personal computer and mobile telephone device" which is "A portable computer telephone device comprising a portable personal computer and a mobile phone integrated into one and the same body structure."...
... I've been thinking lately I'd like to see better durability of wearable electronic devices. We stand at the dawn of the Age of Ubiquity, where information is global and local at once and rests in the palm of our hand, yet my pager got wet so I'm out fifty bucks. Durability means being able to drop your $200 Rio without a worry. Scratched the cover too much? Maybe you will be able to slip on an inexpensive new Rio "skin"---pick your designer cover like you can on the Nokia phones face plates. I'm sure somebody can make money with that idea...
Chris St. John , Editor, 12/17/98
I was at the AEA Classic (11/11/98)
Today was a long and exciting day at the American Electronics Association Classic. The annual Classic is one of the premier meeting places for technology companies and financial analysts. This year it is being held from November 8-12 at the Sheraton Marina hotel in San Diego.
The Sheraton is basically taken over by the conference. There is alot of action in those corridors, from the big and small players. But the best part of attending the conference is the ability to chat with and watch presentations from the CEO's, CFO's, and other executives of some really interesting technology companies (and grabbing the NASDAQ post-it cubes!). Getting up close and personal with the actual principals of the company is much better than reading the news releases or looking at a stock price. It's like adding color to a black and white picture.
Being a wearable computer enthusiast, my main interest today was seeing Xybernaut and meeting the Xybernaut team. For those unfamiliar with the company, Xybernaut makes a wearable computer called the Mobile Assistant. The Mobile Assistant is truly wearable: it is a small walkman-sized device attached to a belt that can be used for mobile applications. The Mobile Assistant is also a true computer: the new Mobile Assistant IV is a fully functional Wintel computer with 4 GB hard drive, 128 MB RAM and the ability to run familiar PC programs and operating systems like Windows, Linux, DOS, etc. The display is a lightweight headset with a sort of mini-monitor, which appears as a 17" screen but is actually the size of a quarter. Although Kopin made the previous generation display, the display for the Mobile Assistant IV is made by Hitachi. The base price for the unit is expected to be under $5,000.
Enough of that...now let's get to what you have all been waiting for:
The Xybernaut presentation was held in a small room on the fifth floor of the Sheraton, where several other Session III (small cap) companies were also presenting. There were three Xybernaut employees present: Dr. Steve Newman, Vice Chairman Board of Directors, Michael Jenkins, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer and Dr. Mark Bergman, investor relations. As a side note, I was also told that Alex Kankaris, designer of the new Xybernaut website, was also floating around, but I didn't meet him.
When the presentation was ready to begin there were about ten people in the room. I looked for names and firms but couldn't get much. There was a representative from Briefing.com, an analyst from a firm I wasn't familiar with and some casually attired techie-looking guys in the front. Keep in mind this was one session of many, I didn't get a look at the others.
Steve Newman introduced the company and its primary product the Mobile Assistant IV (as I described above). He also showed a slide that included a list of clients like Shell, NTT, US government agencies and Schlumberger. There was another long list of alliances such as is included in the company's literature. One interesting story that came out was how Ed Newman, Steve's brother and CEO of Xybernaut, was in charge of convincing Xerox of the utility of the "personal computer" back in the 1970's. Newman's project was to show how a PC would increase the efficiency of Xerox's patent office. Although Xerox never got into the PC business, Newman met Jim Ralabate, head of Xybernaut's intellectual property team and famed Xerox patent attorney.
There were a few major points which Steve Newman repeated several times in his presentation. First, Xybernaut has a strong patent position and they feel they will reap the reward of licensing from their patents. Second, they have specifically built the company to not be a manufacturer. Although they are not a manufacturing company, they retain ownership of the patents, tooling and designs. Their idea is to outsource and monitor closely. Third, they are mainly concerned with building a strong foundation of alliances, rather than immediately going for the fastest short-term gain. The example he gave was that they could probably sell thousands of computers at a place like Sharper Image, but that could actually destroy the company. Fourth, in reference to the upcoming "significant revenues", Xybernaut says they are being conservative with their estimates, indicating management believes revenues will be greater than forecasts and forecasts will be less than purchase commitments for the year ending 1999. They did state that the profit margin per machine was about 35%. I felt that forecasts may be made available soon, although this was not stated.
They have done some testing of units (earlier generation) with the Border Patrol. The Border Patrol checks vehicle license plates on cars crossing the border into Mexico from the US on a regular basis (a big problem is cars being stolen from the US and taken into Mexico). The regular way the Border Patrol works, they have to do everything manually, so they can check 5-15 cars an hour. With the Mobile Assistant they were able to check 100-125 cars an hour.
The Xybernaut team seems highly motivated to introduce their product beginning next week at Comdex. Obviously the biggest motivator is the product itself. But there are smaller things also. For example, all of the Xybernaut employees (from US, Asia and Europe) at once were recently on a conference call to motivate them for the coming launch. They are each keeping personal calendars preparing for the launch with goals and duties each day, even holidays. Also, employees (at least at the conference) were wearing buttons saying "Make It Happen!".
The new website is expected to be launched in the next few days. Newman said they will be attempting to broadcast a live video feed from Comdex to their website. Also, the investor relations department is being reorganized to be more "investor-friendly". Dr. Bergman, formerly a partner at technology-investment banking giant Hambrecht and Quist, seems to be overseeing some changes on the investor relations front.
After the presentation we were able to try out the Mobile Assistant IV computer. It was actually smaller than I thought it would be (but as small as I had hoped!) and I could see the mini-display perfectly in seconds. The nice thing about the display is that it is easy to see around you and the screen at the same time. I had no problem looking away from the screen and ahead of me and then focusing back on the display. I did not get a chance to use the voice recognition part though.
Overall, I was very impressed with both the product and the Xybernaut team. I found Steve Newman to be very warm and confident. Michael Jenkins was friendly and intensely talked about developing Xybernaut's products. He is a co-founder of Xybernaut and one of the main inventors of the wearable technology. Also, he knew about WearableGear.com (bonus points!). Dr. Bergman seems like he will be a great asset in investor relations and seemed eager to work on relations with the financial community.
That is all for now, but if you have any questions or comments, email me...I was at the AEA
Chris St. John
cstjohn@wearablegear.com
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