Great Aussie gadgets
Jeanne-Vida Douglas, ZDNet Australia
02 September 2002
In the 1950's, it took Dr David Warren five years to get anyone to take his "Black Box" flight data recorder seriously. By 1958 he had produced the prototype "ARL Flight Memory Unit" which, despite getting a favourable response in Europe and the US, was not widely used in Australia until the 1960's.
More recently, Mike O'Dwyer, inventor of the revolutionary ballistics behind Metal Storm technology, tried unsuccessfully to find development partners in Australia before eventually going offshore. His company Metal Storm now has a market capitalisation of over AU$500 million after successfully listing on the ASX and Nasdaq.
However, not all Australian innovators have been forced to seek recognition and funding in far-off lands.
Daniel Elbaum, chairman and CEO of Melbourne-based ProjectLab, got his original idea after tripping over CDs in his son's room. Rather than just complaining, he decided to do something about it and invented an automated unit for the storage and retrieval of data CDs.
The past 12 months have seen 20,000 units of Elbaum's Australian-made storage units shipped throughout Australia, the US and Asia, and the company is expecting shipments to continue to increase for the rest of the year.
"First we brought out the Century CD to deal with existing data CDs. It is simple but easy to control with the database interface," Elbaum said.
He then took the idea one step further by adding read/write functionality to the unit, effectively creating a small business storage solution.
"We made them stackable and affordable, so that they can grow along with a business," Elbaum said.
While ProjectLab intellectual property covers all aspects of the Century CD, from the robotics within the unit to the software interface, other ideas have more diverse origins.
In the case of PocketMail, whose flagship product provides portable access to e-mail through a device the size of a PDA, it is the result of a mixture of previous ideas. As David Shearer, chief operating officer of PocketMail explains, the entire device depends on an "acoustic coupler" developed initially by NASA and licensed to PocketMail in 2001.
When some major device developers tried their luck with similar devices, PocketMail inherited a partially completed design for a mobile device for receiving and sending e-mail mid way through 1999. It took a motley crew of mechanical engineers, electronic engineers and software engineers to take these plans and create a functioning prototype.
"The proposition is simple," Shearer explained. "The device allows you to pick up your e-mail wherever there is a phone line, just by holding the handset against the back of the gadget."
However, what is particularly inventive about PocketMail is that the product is targeted at a group generally ignored by technology innovators.
"When we launched the product a lot of techies laughed," Shearer said. "But baby boomers are now the bulk of our customers. A lot of them may not even have had a computer, but they want to keep in contact with their family over e-mail, so we have made our product accessible to them."
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Media Contact
Richard Shaw
PocketMail Group Limited
Sydney, Australia
(02) 9955 0500
richard.shaw@pkt.com.au
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