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Bob Fullerton Q&A


Mon Jul 10, 2000 - 1:55 PM EDT - By James Hromadka , Marcus Adolfsson

Fullerton Q&A at PC Expo

If there is one company that users have been clamoring for products since the inception of the Visor, it is InnoGear. In poll after poll and in the emails we receive, InnoGear is the company to beat. At the PC Expo in June, 2000, Marcus and I had a chance to catch up with Bob Fullerton, president of InnoGear, and ask him about InnoGear's future products. Below is our interview.

VC (James): A few months ago InnoGear announced that Global Access would be taking over development of the InfoMitt. Is there a partnership or did you sell that product to them?

Fullerton: It was a business decision we made to help us get our flagship products (MiniJam & SixPak) out sooner. Also the paging market is a different niche than we had anticipated. Global Access , as far as a company from the paging industry, is a very good company to transfer that product to.

VC (James): In VisorCentral's discussion area there were questions about InnoGear releasing a stand-alone multimedia card (MMC) reader. Is that a product that InnoGear is definately considering

Fullerton: We're definately considering that, and its a project on the roadmap. It's already there -- it's a small offshoot of the MiniJam, so we don't have to redesign anything. It's a very simple tooling effort, so expect to see that this year for sure.

VC (James): Have you considered some of the other various flash technologies like Compact Flash? What made you decide to use MMC instead of CF?

Fullerton: The size/ form factor. When you look at CF it's not just the size fo the flash card itself; it's the connector that wraps around it. That system takes up one side of the PC board, so it wipes out the surface area. Our poducts would have been two times as large if we would have went with compact flash. Also there's a lot more power draw. The third issue is that you basically create software to let the Palm OS look at DOS-formatted file formats. What we've created in the process of developing MiniJam is a Palm-friendly file system that we call IGFS (InnoGear File System). That enables us to drag-and-drop Palm applications and Palm database files and write them to the MMC. So we've now created a mass-storage device for the Palm OS.

VC (James): With the MiniJam I know that you are working with MiniJukebox software. Is that on the Palm OS side or Windows?

Fullerton: MiniJukeBox is our Palm OS software for the Visor; Music Match is a popular jukebox that runs on Windows and soon on the Mac, where it is currently in beta on the MusicMatch site. I'm not sure if it will make the CD when we start shipping, but we'll have links on our newly restructured InnoGear site and a new site called MiniJam.com. Users will be pointed to the mac version and any updates on the Windows version as they come out.

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