Article title: Momenta Unveils the Pentop Computer
Publication: MicroTimes
Author: Mary Eisenhart
Date published: 1991-11-25
Excerpt
On October 7th, amid much elaborate hoopla at the Santa Clara Convention Center, a previously close-mouthed Mountain View startup called Momenta unveiled its first product. Shortly thereafter, Momenta figured prominently in press coverage of COMDEX as one of the few genuinely interesting vendorstand products on the scene.
The product: a 386-based notebook computer with a difference a screen you can write on. Currently shipping in an LCD version with a backlit model due in February, the Momenta "pentop" bridges the gap between the coming crop of pen input computers and current standards: It runs MS-DOS and Windows, and will support pen enhancements to the latter as Microsoft makes them available. It also includes its own Smalltalk-based environment, containing bundled applications that let even the computer illiterate user do useful work within minutes of unpacking the machine, without acquiring a single DOS application.
Along the way, Momenta`s founders made some interesting design choices to bridge the gap between current and future technologies. Diverging from the usual design of pen-input machines, they made the keyboard (a decent-sized one at that) an integral part of the machine design, but detachable so the user could take the screen/ computer into meetings and other keyboard-impaired situations and use the machine as a notepad.
They also acknowledged the limitations of current handwriting recognition technology by building into the machine a `command compass`-a pie-chart-like menu containing functions like Copy, Move, Paste, etc., which can be called up from anywhere in the system and simply tapped to produce the desired effect. In the course of developing the machine, Momenta`s engineers found a wide variance among different users as to which gestures were `intuitive,` and also enough variance as to how the same user made the same gesture that it seemed wise to have a standard interface for commonly used commands. Says software development director Beatriz lnfante: `We felt that the command and control of the machine had to be 100%. Given today`s technology, and probably any technology for the next five years, you`re not ever going to get 100%. The problem with failures with command and control is that it leads to great inefficiencies in using the machine, because you then start developing a lack of confidence.
Founded in 1989 by entrepreneur Kamran Elahian, who had previously cofounded CAE Systems and Cirrus Logic, Momenta is a truly international startup, with investors from the US, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The machines are manufactured in Singapore, and the government of Singapore is one of the company`s investors. Says marketing vice president John Rizzo (no stranger to revolutionary- interface computing, having been the product marketing manager for Macintosh in 1984 and 1985): `We`re manufactured in Singapore for a very simple reason. We think that this market is very cost-competitive, and if we have the greatest technology in the world and are too expensive, we`re going to be out of the market. So we`re producing it in a low-cost capitaland labor market. Singapore and Thailand and Malaysia have extremely well established surface-mount production lines, and very low cost of capital and cost of labor. And because we have investors from those markets, we can get some very favorable tax credits.`
Unlike currently available pen-input systems, which address mostly vertical markets, Momenta targets abroad user base of people who use computers in their work, run many applications, and need to take the computer wherever they go. At $4995 list ($5495 for the backlit model due in February), the machine is competitively priced with other vendors`386SX notebooks. Momenta hopes the pentop`s additional capabilities make it the new professional`s choice.
THE VISION
Kamran Elahian, President and CEO
Why did you decide to start Momenta?
A dream of mine was to create a computer I could use myself. I had bought personal computers before-I had never learned DOS or Windows, but I did buy a Macintosh, and after that I bought some other notebook machines. I could never use them for a very long period, because I would go to many different meetings and I could never really spend enough time to become expert on any of these machines.
I wanted a type of machine that was much easier to use, and I could take it with me anywhere, and use it in the meetings.
I did not come from a PC industry. Previously I had co-founded a semi-conductor company and before that I’d co-founded a software company. PCs were a new business for me, so I started to go around and talk to a lot of experts. When I talked to the people who eventually became the management team], all of these people had a similar idea, and when I explained to them what my needs were and what could be interesting from my point of view, all these people became very excited and said they`d been thinking along the same lines. They wanted to come and make it happen.
We talked to some of the investors who had a good relationship with us in the past-we had made a lot of money together with the investors in my previous ventures. At the beginning, they asked us for a business plan, and we didn`t have time to write one, so they gave us a million dollars with no business plan.
A lot of your investment comes from firms in Europe and Asia. Did you have trouble getting finding from US sources?
One of the key reasons we went global is that when you have to raise $50 million, regardless of how happy or generous your investors are, you cannot rely on your base of capital to be located in only one country.
That`s one issue, and the second is that when you concentrate your investors all in one country, all you get from them is their money. Whereas if you have investors from different countries, they can really help you with setting up your subsidiaries, with negotiations with local vendors, with recruiting of your key personnel in each of those countries, with introductions to the local banks-au those kinds of things.
So from day one, our plan was to have a global group of investors, and depending on the length of relationship I`ve had with the people in the past, they came at different stages. American investors had worked with me quite a bit in the past, and they believed in me, so they were the first ones who gave us, effectively, our first five million. In the second round, which was about seven million, we had American investors plus the new investors from Singapore and Taiwan. And then in the third round of financing, which was for about eighteen million, we had the American investors, additional Singapore investors, additional investors from Japan, some from Taiwan, some investors from Europe, and some from the Middle East, primarily Kuwait. In the round we just finished last week, another ten million, we had, again, all the previous investors, plus some more from Singapore, Indonesia, new investors from Korea, and one other new investor from the Middle East. Each time we add more investors. But through this whole process, you get to have really deep pockets behind the company.
How did you develop the relationships with all these international investors?
These things do not come easily. In the last six years I`ve been to Japan fifty-two times, twenty-three times to Europe, about sixteen times to Taiwan, over ten times to Singapore, six or seven times to Korea. You have to go over there, build relationships. My previous company, Cirrus L4Dgic, was quite an international company also, and I was not only cofounder of Cirrus Logic USA, I was also cofounder of Cirrus Logic Japan, Cirrus Logic Taiwan, and Cirrus Logic Germany.
For each one of those you had to go spend time with the local people, learn their customs, learn their languages, learn the way they do business. People fundamentally are people all over the world- this is a global world. If you take care of them, if you set up partner- ships where they win, and they win big, and they make money with you and they see that you are being fair and equitable with them, they always want to work with you in the future again. Even if they aren`t able to give you money, they always refer you to other people who might be able to give you money.
You have to work at it very hard. For every one of the investors who believed in us and gave us money, there were five other ones did not believe in us, thought we were crazy, and would kick us out of their office. [laughs] So you just have to have a thick hide and keep looking, keep working it out, and don`t take it personally, and just keep going back and looking for more and more.
You wanted a machine that would be somebody’s only machine, run two different operating environments, and the current state of off the shelf chips did not support that.
We had to do some custom chips. The key thing is not so much handwriting input; more important is pen-centric. The software we`ve developed is so easy to use, you do not have to pay a lot of attention to the machine. You can just pick up the pen an start writing, exactly the same way you can pick up a pen and start writing on a piece of paper You don`t need to worry about files or directories-everything you write is automatically saved for you. There is no Save command...
The idea is if you`re imitating paper, once you write something on paper, it`s there. Why do you need to save it? Save is one of those artificial concepts that computers created.
If you create that kind of environment, people in meetings can use the computer just like a pen on paper, without having to spend much time paying attention to the machine. If you look at our target market-office workers who are not clerical and are not scientifically oriented, salespeople, marketing people, lawyers, doctors, managers, executives, investors, brokers-all these are office workers who spend the majority of their time in meetings.
What does a salesperson do? What does a marketing person do? What does a doctor do? They all go from one meeting to another. If you cannot use your keyboard computer in a meeting, regardless of how light it is, regardless of how cheap it is, regardless of how small it is, when you bring a notebook machine into a meeting, it disrupts the meeting. So if you cannot do that, then you cannot use it in a meeting. So if you spend the majority of your time in meetings and can`t take the machine to the meeting with you, then you don`t use it. So we said, `Why not provide a choice?"
The implementation was rather difficult, because when you hire engineers, the first thing engineers want to do is throw away the things of the past and start fresh. But we are not technology zealots, so we had some very good talks with our engineers. We said, " Hey, we cannot ignore the past, regardless of how good or how bad you think it was. We have to stay compatible with it. Let`s go and find a very interesting, compelling new object-oriented environment without throwing away the past.` It was a very difficult task we gave our engineers-find a way to stay compatible, yet do very innovative, revolutionary things. My hat`s off to our team.
Do you see your product line expanding beyond a single machine?
Oh, of course. We do not like to talk about our future plans too much, because we believe in under –promise and over deliver. We kept everything under wraps until two weeks ago. We passed FCC three months ago, and usually it takes most people many months after they announce their product to do that.
We do have some very exciting products in the works, and if you like what you see then wait a couple of more quarters, and you’ll be amazed with the new things we offer, one after the other. There is a very rich family we are developing.
We went out and these phenomenal engineers who love what they are doing. After they have finished their first product, what do you do with them? They’re already working on really neat things.
[END]
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