Interview: Vince Lee

I was very fortunate to be able to get an exclusive interview with Mr. Vince Lee, the founder of TealPoint Software. I hope you enjoy getting to know a little be more about the company behind some of the great products I’ve been reviewing this week.
Could you tell me a bit about how TealPoint Software was founded?
I started TealPoint Software back when I was still a full time Project Leader at LucasArts, developing mostly Star Wars titles for the software wing of George’s film empire. While I found my day job fullfilling, I found a need to use some of the diverse skills I’d learned in that position in a new way; for an enterprise I could call my own.
About 5 years ago, I was having sushi with one of the artists on my team when he let me try new high-tech toy; a PalmPilot Personal. I was skeptical at first, but after finding myself doodling in a paint program for an hour, I realized I was hooked. I went out and bought one the next day, and had begun work on a first program by the end of the week. As I built more products and started selling them, I realized it was time to leave LucasArts, hire some good people, and run it as a separate business full time. The rest is well… history.
You have an amazing array of Palm OS utilities, including several applications that seem like they should have been built into the operating system in the first place. Why did you decide to concentrate on this particular niche in the handheld market?
In general, my philosophy, and I guess the company’s as well, has been to try to develop applications which enrich our customers’ overall experience with their handhelds. The guiding principal we’ve used has been simple. We make the apps which we ourselves would like to have.
Some companies have been putting a great deal of effort and expense into building high-profile, high-powered applications like word processors, spreadsheets, and web browsers, for instance. While these are very worthwhile and absolutely necessary for the health of the PalmOS platform, all that competition brings inherent risks and costs as each company tries to out-do, out-feature, and out-market each other.
And yet, if you look around at the majority of Palm handheld owners, still most of them use their devices primarily for the built-in applications. Typically, they might have a doc reader and a few games loaded up, but rarely do most people use them for anything approaching a desktop replacement. By creating applications which enhance basic functionality of programs and operating system, we can offer a better experience for most of these users, helping them in ways tailored to how most people use their devices.
TealMovie is something of a departure from the rest of your programs, which are mainly utilities. How did this product come about?
TealMovie didn’t originally start out as a full product. Instead, it was just an experiment. I had spent many years at LucasArts developing video compression technology for games such as Rebel Assault and Rebel Assault II, and wondered if it were possible to design a video system which would work for the storage, cpu, and display limitations of Palm handhelds. There were a few fledgling technologies out there, but most of them seriously flawed, either using no compression whatsoever, resulting in unusably large files, were too slow, or distorted the image terribly unless
they contained large solid areas of black or white. I knew I could do better. After many weeks, the experiments resulted in what eventually became TealMovie.
Any plans to develop for the Pocket PC platform?
While we’re firm supporters of the Palm platform, no one in this space can be responsible without at least considering Pocket PC development. While we’re keeping our eyes open, we don’t yet have any plans to release Pocket PC versions of our products for a number of reasons.
First, our expertise is in PalmOS. Were we to start developing for Pocket PC, we’d have to start from scratch again, which would naturally require a sizeable investment in both time and money, resources we currently have earmarked for other purposes. Secondly, the markets aren’t yet comparable. While Microsoft has been spending a lot of PR muscle touting the adoption of their units in Europe and the corporate world, most analysts agree that PalmOS still holds a clear lead in the market. More importantly to us, third party software sales on PalmOS completely eclipse those on the Pocket PC, possibly because Pocket PC units tend to be bundled with lots of software which competes directly with any third party add-ons. In any case, what this means is that with the limited development resources we currently have, it just makes more financial sense right now to spend those resources on, say, creating a new PalmOS application rather than converting existing apps to Pocket PC.
What is your vision of the near future in handheld computing, especially considering the technological advances we’ve seen in the last five years?
Industry pundits always push the latest technological development, be it faster processors, smart phones, expansion cards, or bluetooth, but I’m not so sure consumers have made up their minds that that’s what they want. It looks like combination phone/organizers are starting to gain wider acceptance on the high end of the cost scale, but we haven’t seen the same type of breakthrough we saw when Palm released the original Pilot organizer years ago. In fact, most people purchasing handhelds today could still be reasonably served by that original unit sold in 1996.
Instead, I think the advances are going to be incremental. Many features which now require external add-ons such as cameras, mp3 players, and phones will become standard equipment on high end units. At the same time, the units will continue to get smaller, faster, and cheaper. I wouldn’t be surprised if in the next two years, we’ll see entry-level PalmOS handhelds selling for $60, and a basic phone/organizer combos for $150 with activation.
Do you have any secrets or tidbits about upcoming products I can convince you to share with my readers?
We’re of course preparing our products for the upcoming release of PalmOS 5.0 later this year. We have our flagship products already working and are progressing to some of the smaller titles. At the same time, we’re also working on a new application-specific data logging and tracking product for mobile handheld users. We’ll probably be getting an “Alpha” test version up on our beta test page in the next month or so, but that’s about all I can say about it for now.
Thank you for your time.
Thank you.