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By Richard Morochove
First published July 22, 1999
COMDEX Canada is still Canada's largest annual computer show and conference, even though exhibit space appeared to shrink once again this year. Comdex isn't an important a show as it once was. While the show remains a great networking opportunity, few new products are introduced. Most vendors prefer to launch them at the much larger PC Expo held in New York a few weeks earlier or sometime later.
Case in point: Palm Computing president Alan Kessler was a keynote speaker at COMDEX Canada. Yet the company waited until after the show closed to launch its latest handheld organizer.
The new Palm IIIe (list price $329) is the company's lowest-priced unit, aimed at home users such as students and parents. It comes with 2 megabytes of memory, sufficient for 6,000 addresses and five years of appointments.
Kessler took the helm of Palm Computing, a division of 3Com, on July 7, its fourth president in the past year. That turnover at the top might indicate a problem, but it's not evident in sales results.
According to market research firm Evans Research, Palm devices accounted for 84 per cent of all handheld shipments in Canada during the first quarter of 1999. Kessler said per capita use of Palm devices is higher in Canada than any other country in the world.
Why is Palm so successful?
"The zen of Palm is that it does just what you need it to do, maybe just a little bit more," said Kessler. "It doesn't try and do too much."
One of the most anticipated Palm enhancements is a colour display. Kessler said he doesn't believe the market has reached the right convergence of battery life, screen quality, ease of use, availability of supply and cost. When it does, Palm will be there with a colour device.
Although COMDEX Canada has marginal relevance to international computing firms, it's still important to Canadian outfits, including one that displayed one of the show's highlights.
Chances are you've never heard of Kaufman Consulting Services Ltd. (KCSL), even if you've used one of its programs. This quiet Canadian success story usually licenses its software for others to market. The Toronto-based company specializes in developing the data compression and performance engines that power many language and reference programs.
KCSL is the company behind Microsoft Word's spelling and grammar checker, the multimedia version of McClelland & Stewart's The Canadian Encyclopedia, The American Heritage Dictionary and programs marketed by Corel and Lotus Development.
Now KCSL has come out with the best Internet search engine I've seen, even though it's more of a filter than a search engine in the conventional sense. Typically, when you search for Internet information using a popular search engine such as Excite or Altavista your results will include a lot of garbage. Sorting through the search results to find what you really want is like trying to pick a couple of diamonds out of a bucket of crushed ice.
KCSL's X-Portal Findware version 1.09 ($69.95 in stores by August or from www.kcsl.ca) comes with 22 reference works, including dictionaries, almanacs, an atlas and encyclopedia. But its real value comes as an Internet search tool.
After installing the software, click on the X-Portal button in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and a window appears on the left side of the screen. Ask a question in that window and X-Portal searches its own references and then the Internet for the answer. It comes with links to over 30 search engines and you can add your own.
KCSL claims X-Portal reduces search time by more than 80 per cent while improving the accuracy of returns. This is one time when the results live up to the hype. I found X-Portal Findware eliminates duplicate and irrelevant Internet search results better than anything else I've seen. It's one gem of a program.
COMDEX Canada's most embarrassing episode came when Bell phone lines in the convention centre died on Friday. Exhibitors using Bell lines to dial-up to the Internet to demonstrate product features had nothing to show in their expensive booths.
Faces were especially glum over at the Sympatico exhibit. The high-speed edition of the phone company's Internet service turned out to be no-speed when I strolled by.
If a dropped worker's tool can cause such a major service disruption, it makes you wonder about other weaknesses in the company's disaster preparation plans.
There is now competition for local telephone service in Toronto and many other parts of Canada. This incident will drive many people dependent upon reliable phone service to give a portion of their phone business to a competitor, to ensure some lines remain operational in an emergency. CW
Richard Morochove, FCA, is a Toronto-based computer consultant.
Copyright ©1999 by Morochove & Associates Inc. All rights reserved. This work may not be copied or distributed by any means without our prior written permission.
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