WizCom, an Israeli company which hitherto has concentrated on Europe, made its debut this week at the Comdex Exhibition. The company, owned by Lipman and Mivtah Shamir, announced a revolutionary new product at the 1997 CeBIT Exhibition in Germany: Quicktionary. Quicktionary is an optic scanner, resembling a pen in appearance, which translates a written word by scanning it on an attached screen.
The press conference at the time was accompanied by a great commotion and many friends - Israeli businessmen, who came to Hannover to escort the launching of a production with great potential, which aroused many expectations. The dream ended, however, and reality was more prosaic. Sales commenced in August 1997, during which year WizCom had sales of $8 million. In 1998, sales soared to $15.8 million, with another rise expected this year.
Now, a year and a half after the beginning of commercial marketing, WizCom has announced a new product at Comdex likely to elevate the company, traded on the stock exchange in Germany, several levels higher. The new product is a pen, called QuickLink Pen, which scans and stores in its memory, rather than translating. The new product has four main applications:
- Complete text scanning by rows, as opposed to Quicktionary's single word, practically without memory space limitation - up to 2 Mgb - 1,000 pages of text.
- Scanning business cards according to sequences of name, address, regular and mobile telephone, fax, mailing and e-mail address, and so on.
- Scanning URL Internet addresses.
- Scanning tables.
The pen does not translate, but only scans. None of these scanning features existed in the original Quicktionary. The scanned material can be transferred for saving and presentation on a personal computer or palm pilot, or sent as an SMS message on a cellular telephone, through infrared communications or serial connecting cable.
WizCom general manager David Gal says that the product is tailored for the US market, and therefore Comdex is the best place to launch it. The product will be launched in Israel this month at the Comdex Israel Exhibition. The market targeted is the most advanced information market: free professionals and businessmen needing information storage abilities when they are not around a computer or table-sized optical scanner. The market includes students, lawyers, journalists, and so on.
The product is based on an open approach - the architecture is available (for a fee), and various applications can be developed on it. WizCom signed an agreement, announced this week, with US company Metaware, which specializes in developing applications for software that can be downloaded to and used on QuickLink Pen, unconnected to WizCom.
This approach was developed during the last two years by 3Com, which develops and markets the Palm Pilot, and succeeded in greatly increasing the product's popularity. WizCom signed another agreement with Yahoo!, which will allow automatic connection of the scanning pen to the Yahoo! Internet site for searches.
WizCom also announced Quicktionary 2, the upgraded version of the original product, at Comdex. In contrast to QuickLink Pen, which is already on its way to US stores, Quicktionary 2 will commence commercial marketing only in January 2000. Quicktionary 2 is actually based on QuickLink Pen, with the addition of linguistic features.
In July, WizCom announced the opening of an e-commerce Internet site.
Two products competing with QuickLink were announced at Comdex. The first is Pocket Reader, by German Siemens. The second, by a Swedish company, is C-Pen.
Another product competing with QuickLink, developed by an Israeli company, is called Top-Scan. Top-Scan, however, is hooked up online to a computer and doesn't work independently. The two companies negotiated concerning the possibility of WizCom investment in Top-Scan, to date without results.
Ownership of WizCom is divided between Lipman (20%), Mivtah Shamir (15%), the public (40%), and institutional and privat investors (25%).
Published by Israel's Business Arena on November 22, 1999