Consumer Electronics: Neil Peretz
Frustration breeds an innovation

In London, desperate to download e-mail and unable to find a phone jack, Neil Peretz and his friend Scott Fullam turned their fruitless search into something positive: a new company. That company, PocketScience Inc., is one of a new breed of consumer-electronics outfits convinced that the network holds the key both to new application-specific gadgets and the services that drive them.

As Peretz, who is 31, recalled it, "I was with this MIT graduate and former Apple engineer," Fullam, now chief technology officer of PocketScience. "We were in London in early 1995 to attend a friend's wedding. Scott flew in from California and I from China.

"Between us, we had more than $8,000 worth of laptop equipment. We made several trips to Radio Shacks in London to get power and telephone connections. After all that running around, we still couldn't get connected.

"Sitting in our hotel lobby in London, I wondered out loud why such a simple thing as sending and receiving e-mail has to be so hard."

So the pair decided that solv-ing that problem would be the mission of the company that they started in late 1995 in Santa Clara, Calif., with financial backing from several venture capitalists, including those from Japan, as well as several prominent industry individuals. The founders are a unique combination. Peretz, who is single and "married to PocketScience," is a former investment banker and U.S. commercial attache in the People's Republic of China, where he helped U.S. computer and telecommunications suppliers expand their marketing and distribution. He is a graduate of Tufts University with BS and MS degrees in electrical engineering. And Fullam, a graduate from MIT with BSEE and MSEE degrees, is an expert design engineer who has worked for IBM, General Electric, Apple, Hasbro and Mattel.

So far, they have designed a smart communication device and a service, PocketMail, that allows consumers to send e-mail or fax messages from virtually any handset phone in the world-even a pay phone. They did this by hiring a San Francisco company to design their handheld product, a team of software engineers in Russia to write code and a Hong Kong-based manufacturer whose production arm is in southern China.

PocketScience then licensed the technology to JVC and Sharp Corp., under whose brand names the devices are marketed in the United States.

To use the service, subscribers need only write a message on a $99 PocketMail device, dial the nationwide toll-free access number and push one button while holding the device against the telephone handset to send and receive e-mail messages. They do not have to find a phone jack or figure out complex dialing sequences when calling from different locations, nor do they need costly wireless services. And they don't have to lug around a bulky portable computer equipped with a modem.

Peretz, the company's president and chief executive officer, describes his business by saying, "We are an e-mail dial-tone company."

The company has also built an elaborate PocketMail network operation center, composed of the company's DSP servers and mail servers, in addition to data manager, polling servers, dispatchers and fax servers. Mail services' load balancing is managed by Alteon switches and the network operation center is backed up by the fault-tolerant systems. The network also comes with a number of systems critical for monitoring, trouble ticketing and customer care.

Most new U.S. consumer companies acknowledge that they've learned a great deal from some of the disastrous experiences of previous Silicon Valley-based consumer washouts such as 3DO, Go Computer and General Magic. Most important, they say they've learned to be focused.

"We want to be 'Specific Magic' rather than General Magic," said Peretz.

Soup to nuts
Furthermore, compared with its predecessors, PocketScience claims to be engaged in almost every aspect of its consumer-electronics business. The company does everything from writing specs to building services and even signing up contractors for mass production, before signing up OEM partners.

Also, the company is working to shorten the time necessary for PocketMail users to get connected and start downloading their e-mail immediately. Again, the art of preprocessing all the e-mail, in terms of trimming the standard mail format to the correct size and filtering it, has to be applied to the company's data-communication infrastructure, rather than the device itself.

"For us," said Peretz, "new features are not about new buttons or new color displays. New features are closely tied to new applications.

"It directly translates into how extensible we build our network architecture."

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