Programming Blog

It was a bit of a mystery when Len Lauer resigned as chief operating officer of Qualcomm last month. It was equally puzzling when he surfaced a couple of weeks later at Memjet, a closely held company most people have never heard of.

Lauer has a reputation as a communications-industry heavyweight. After more than 10 years at IBM, he took jobs like chief executive of Bell Atlantic-New Jersey and COO of Sprint Nextel before joining Qualcomm in late 2006. In becoming CEO of Memjet, he is changing industries to lead an ambitious effort to shake up the printer market.

What’s so different about Memjet’s approach? For starters, conventional inkjet printers have a print head that moves back and forth across the page. Consequently, they tend to be slow, noisy and shake your desk. (Not so laser printers, of course, but they tend to be relatively expensive).

Memjet hopes to market it calls a “page wide” print head, which remains stationary and lays down ink across a page as the paper moves past it. That increases printing speeds by eight to 10 times, Lauer says. He estimates its technology will print 60 pages per minute; while some conventional inkjet printers advertise 30 to 32 pages per minute, they more often complete six pages or so in that time, he says. Lauer also estimates that Memjet’s ink costs will be 30% to 40% lower than current inkjet technology.

Memjet’s assertions carry a bit more weight than your average startup’s. The technology is the brainchild of Kia Silverbrook, a prolific inventor in Australia who was once a chief technology officer for Japan’s Canon, one of the longtime kingpins in printer technology. Silverbrook has been working on the page wide approach for more than a dozen years; Memjet says it holds more than 2,600 patents, with 2,000 more pending.

The company–based, like Qualcomm, in San Diego–has more than 600 employees, with about 400 of its engineers in Sydney, Lauer says. Memjet has never disclosed precisely how much it has raised, but Lauer says the amount comes to “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of dollars. Its biggest investor is Argonaut Private Equity.

Memjet doesn’t plan to make printers itself. Rather, it plans to sell print heads, ink and other components to companies that will sell printers. Potential customers could include the big companies that dominate the market–think of names like Canon, Hewlett-Packard and Xerox–as well as new companies that have never before been able to make printers.

In that way, Lauer says, the company could function a bit like Qualcomm did in cellphones–supplying chips to help scores of companies enter the handset market, which was once the exclusive preserve of giants like Nokia and Motorola. He says Memjet could help restructure the printer industry from a few vertically integrated giants to a broader “horizontal” ecosystem, with companies specializing in components, complete printers and so on.

“It’s a pretty vertical industry,” Lauer says, “and we come in with this horizontal play.”

Charles LeCompte, president of the printer industry research firm Lyra Research, describes what Memjet is attempting as the most interesting thing going on in printers. But the gestation period has been lengthy. Silverbrook announced the technology publicly in 2007 but Memjet still is not shipping any products. “They’ve missed a bunch of deadlines,” LeCompte says.

Lauer says Memjet expects to start delivering products in the second half of this year, initially targeting office printers, label printers and other business applications. It will take some time to generate the volume needed to drive costs down and approach the consumer printer market, he says, but he expects that to happen eventually.

In the meantime, all those patents could come in handy if some big company wants to use its own intellectual property to try to hobble the new competitor. “Is it helpful from a defensive standpoint to have those patents?” Lauer asks, rhetorically. “Yes, it’s very helpful.”

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