The irrepressible Guy Kawasaki, former chief evangelist for Apple Computer, has a new business, garage.com, aimed at nurturing technology startups. In the first stage of the business, unveiled in mid-May, the firm’s Web site, www.garage.com, assembles resources for people who want to form tech companies. It includes forums on commercial and investment banking, law, accounting and venture capital, links to relevant articles and news feeds for information about market trends and key companies.
For now, Kawasaki’s focus is on Silicon Valley. But in the fall, garage.com casts its net more broadly with Heaven, a service where entrepreneurs can try to find angels, the rich investors looking for The Next Big Thing.
“The intent is to take it national,” Kawasaki said. “There’s a lot of really great engineering talent outside of Silicon Valley, but there isn’t necessarily the pool of investors with experience in high tech.”
The firm’s name plays off the birthplace of Apple and other Silicon Valley startups.
Garage.com will make its money by selling ads and sponsorships, charging fees to get into Heaven, charging a fee for consummated financing deals and collecting two or three percent of a new company’s stock.
Kawasaki used to revel in needling Microsoft for the perceived inadequacies of its rival Windows operating system. But times have changed. Kawasaki said that if Microsoft pulled into garage.com to make an investment in a startup, “we would welcome them with open arms.”
Faster connections . . . : Schaumburg-based Motorola Inc. is developing a modem chipset that will work both with ordinary phone lines and the hot new ADSL high-speed Internet connections. Motorola says consumers who get a modem with the new technology can use it now with a standard phone line Internet connection and continue to use it when they get ADSL service.
ADSL, or asymmetric digital subscriber line, provides high-speed access to a network via copper phone lines but requires special wiring at the user’s end and switch-bypass equipment at the central office. The technology is being tested in offices and large new residential buildings in Chicago and elsewhere, and more and more Internet Service Providers are supporting it.
The new chips, to be sold to original equipment manufacturers and which may end up in modems with many different brand names, are referred to as CopperGold Lite Solutions.
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The “lite” comes in because the new technology, while simplifying ADSL installation, does not produce the 6 megabit-per-second (mbps) dataflow speeds of full-rate ADSL. Motorola estimates the new system will move data at between 128 kilobits per second (kbps) and 1.5 mbps–still quite a jump over current maximum copper line speed of 56 kbps.
Motorola spokesman Kathleen Gawel said the company has not yet set a target date for the availability of the new chips.
. . .and more of them: There may be more customers for the new Motorola chipsets if USN Communications Inc. is successful with a new tack announced Friday. Chicago-based USN, a four-year-old local exchange carrier now offering service in 40 states, said at its annual meeting the next step in its growth strategy is deployment of ADSL connections for Internet access.
USN boss J. Thomas Elliott said service should be available on a trial basis by the fourth quarter of 1998.
Elliott said USN currently has about 28,000 small business customers who might benefit from ADSL service. USN does the bulk of its business in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York and Rhode Island.
Stalking new products: Tiger Electronics Inc., the Vernon Hills high-tech toymaker whose Giga Pets have found homes with millions of kids, has introduced some new games and toys that move in both directions on the technological scale.
Moving up the scale are Giga Fighters ($17.99), trainable electronic martial arts practitioners that link together for head-to-head combat. Each fighter shows its opponent’s image on its screen for real-time warfare. Because even Giga Fighters sometimes need help, the toys use your home PC to download codes to unlock special powers from Tiger’s Web site.
Moving the other way on the tech scale is the popular CD-ROM trivia game You Don’t Know Jack, which Tiger now offers in a stand-alone version you can play on the kitchen table ($34.99).
It seems not everybody said “you bet” when the host asked, “Wanna all crowd uncomfortably around the computer and play a game?”
But perhaps the hottest toy Tiger introduced over the weekend at Atlanta’s Electronic Entertainment Expo was Furby ($30), an animatronic pet that interacts through sight, touch, and hearing. Tiger says Furbys learn language through positive reinforcement, communicate with other Furbys via infrared signals and can teach each other tricks and songs.
Sound farfetched? The idea certainly appealed to toy industry giant Hasbro, which in February bought Tiger for $335 million. They wisely left CEO Randy Rissman, who founded the company in 1979, in charge of the place.