Skinny smartphones. Thinner tablets. Lighter laptops. Technology is all about scaling down, right?
Well, InFocus Corp. is heading the other way.
The venerable Oregon projector company, its old business nearly obliterated by bigger competitors, hopes to reboot with a new owner and an unconventional, $6,000 product.
It’s a humongous touch-screen computer, an iPad writ large. Very large.
InFocus’ Mondopad (yes, that’s really the name) weighs as much as 100 of Apple’s tablets. It’s a 55-inch, high-def TV outfitted with a touch-screen and videoconferencing capabilities aimed squarely at the conference room.
If InFocus has a second act, it starts here.
“We’re about taking projectors and presentations in business to the next level, which we think is collaboration,” said Raymond Yu, who took over as InFocus president a year ago. “That’s the future of the company. That’s what we’re working on.”
InFocus was arguably Oregon’s brightest star in the 1990s, when a class of promising startups populated the Silicon Forest with roots that extended back to Tektronix.
In its first incarnation, InFocus helped create the market for digital projectors, which became the ubiquitous companion of PowerPoint presentations in boardrooms and classrooms the world over.
At the turn of the century, InFocus was flirting with a billion dollars in sales when that was still a lot of money. It had more than 1,200 employees at its peak.
As the technology took off, though, InFocus couldn’t keep up. Bigger names — Epson, NEC, Sony and others — got into the business, bringing mightier brands and lower production costs. InFocus relied on key projector technology from Texas Instruments, which licensed that same technology to InFocus’ rivals.
Sales plunged, and round after round of layoffs followed. InFocus’ market share slipped into the single digits.
The nadir came in 2009, when InFocus sold its business to a California technology entrepreneur named John Hui for just $39 million. InFocus closed its high-profile Wilsonville headquarters east of Interstate 5 and decamped to a Tigard office park.
“This company wasn’t going to be able to survive in that environment, doing what it had done in the past,” Yu said. “We had to go through a fairly painful transition for the organization.”
InFocus’ workforce has dwindled to 90 people, with 60 of them in the corporate office. Outwardly, it appeared as though InFocus was heading into oblivion and Hui said little about his plans for the company.
Quietly, though, InFocus had begun to rethink the fundamentals of its business. Yu first came aboard as a consultant in January 2010, seven months after the company’s sale.
“This company had to let go of some of the past,” he said. “The competition was overwhelming.”
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So Yu, 52, sought to steer the company in a new direction. He’s an old friend of Hui’s; they met 26 years ago when Yu worked at Everex Systems, a computer manufacturer that Hui helped found.
As Yu tells it, the Mondopad — unnamed at that time — was the first idea he brought to the table when he arrived at InFocus. His goal, and Hui’s, was to use InFocus’ brand name and sales channel to build a new line of products designed to promote collaboration.
Geared toward InFocus’ historical domain in the conference room, the Mondopad uses a custom interface built atop a Microsoft Windows PC. It’s got a digital whiteboard, videoconferencing tools and a Web browser.
InFocus hopes that, instead of just watching a presentation, people will be able to interact dynamically. They expect the videoconferencing tools will encourage people to collaborate more closely, even when they’re not in the same city.
And they hope the touch screen will make it both more intuitive and more approachable than the classic projector. Hence the Mondopad’s goofy moniker.
“Honestly, I wasn’t thrilled with the name at the beginning,” Yu said. “But having the name be fun and interesting was one of the objectives. I think it’s grown on all of us, and we’re having fun with it.”
Hui, formally InFocus’ chief executive, is rarely in Oregon. He checks in by videoconference from wherever he happens to be, be it at home in Southern California or working his connections with contract manufacturers in China.
Yu commutes from his home in Fremont, Calif., working in Tigard four days a week.
InFocus still sells projectors, which remain the vast majority of its sales. It unveiled the Mondopad a year ago, but has only recently begun its marketing campaign.
Sales to date are in the “hundreds,” according to Yu, but the company is counting on business to take off in the second half of the year and reverse years of declining revenues.
Beyond that, Yu said the company is developing unspecified products around the same themes: business collaboration and interactivity.
“That’s the future of the company,” Yu said. “That’s what we’re working on.”
The Mondopad isn’t as intuitive, or as responsive, as an iPad. But it does follow your finger closely as you draw on the screen or scroll around a Web page, and it allows you to pinch your fingers to zoom in and out like the tablet computer.
The Mondopad’s screen uses an optical interface rather than a capacitive touch screen as the iPad, so the screen sees your finger rather than feels it. The Mondopad connects wirelessly to another PC — or even an iPad — so you can manage it sitting down if you choose.
“I want one at home. It was awesome,” said Ken Westin, a veteran Portland software developer and founder of hardware security company ActiveTrak. Westin tried out the Mondopad last weekend at the Startup Weekend conference, which received a Mondopad on loan from InFocus.
Acknowledging ruefully that the Mondopad’s $6,000 tag prices it out of his living room, Westin said it’s an engaging product that would find a natural home in Portland’s design community.
“This could replace the whiteboard altogether,” Westin said. “That’s a very good thing, I think.”
Tim Anderson, a former InFocus product manager, has been watching his old company with interest as it attempts its overhaul; he credits Hui with righting the ship.
“They were in free-fall when it comes to market share in the projector space,” Anderson said. “Since John (Hui) has taken over that company, they have stabilized.”
Pressure had been steadily accumulating at InFocus in the turbulent years before its sale, with a shareholder revolt and unwelcome takeover bids. By taking the company private, Anderson said, Hui gave InFocus the freedom to be unconventional.
“They’re kind of in a very exciting spot. And being privately held, they’ve got some creative leeway to think more strategically than a public company with its back up against the ropes,” said Anderson, who’s now a marketer for 3LCD, which supplies InFocus and other projector-makers.
Though he hasn’t tried the Mondopad himself, Anderson said it appears to be a creditable effort. He cautions, however, that Lenovo has developed a similar product aimed at the consumer market and that Apple evidently intends to produce its own TV that might offer video chats and other, similar features.
Such products could be adapted as easily to the corporate world as the iPad and iPhone have been.
So the key for InFocus, Anderson said, will be to make the Mondopad the first in a series of new products. If InFocus can build an ecosystem around its technology, and restore its reputation for innovation, he said the company may yet be a player. Again.
“I wouldn’t bet against it,” Anderson said. “I think that they’re still kicking.”
Source:http://www.oregonlive.com/silicon-forest/index.ssf/2012/05/infocus_goes_big_in_search_of.html
