Twenty-seven years after he founded one of Australia's oldest mobile-computing resellers in his parents' house, WA's Neil Hancock again has itchy feet and is considering a move east and listing on the Australian stock exchange.
Hancock's entree to the business came at age 19 while studying engineering at university. Scientific and engineering calculators were replacing slide rules but his dissatisfaction with the HP41 led him to look for an alternative in Sharp's new line of programmable handheld computers.
It was a limitation in that otherwise powerful device that set him on the path to running his own business.
"[The Sharp] turned out to be a lot more powerful [than the HP] but there was no engineering software so I thought I could put together some software that would provide those features," Hancock says. "That's how the Advanced Mathematics Package came to be written."
Over the next year, Hancock risked failing his university studies to achieve early success developing and marketing his first software package.
"I had no idea what business was," he says. "I even asked Sharp at the time if I could sell some pocket computers to my friends.
"I was surprised that they had given me a dealership with a $1000 credit and I had no money to my name. They thought I was 40. It took them the better part of a year to realise how young I was.
"From there they nurtured me quite well."
Hancock says early hurdles included reproducing software on unreliable magnetic tape and finding suppliers to make boxes and print manuals but an early positive review in Electronics Today International magazine convinced him he was on the right path. It culminated in Sharp taking the young Hancock on a national tour to promote his software and their pocket computers.
Today, Portacom is WA's biggest dedicated notebook reseller and service specialist, employing 15 at its inner-city West Perth premises which Hancock bought last year. Since its inception it has specialised in being the road warrior's pit-stop, selling, servicing and supporting mobile devices from handheld computers in the early days to notebooks, netbooks, PDAs and smart phones such as the iPhone today.
Seven years after his software venture, Hancock again went back to the drawing board to develop and patent the touchpad, now synonymous with notebook computers and the foundation for multi-touch technologies.
Most laptops had trackball mice or relied on keyboard cursor input but Hancock's breakthrough was an after-market capacitive touchpad installed in a Sharp notebook. The prototype was a hit at the Comdex trade show in the US yet the innovation did not make Hancock a wealthy man, despite it being the standard form of user input in most portable devices today. Hancock says other companies took the idea and patented around it, thus avoiding royalties for the young inventor.
Hancock still thinks big: he's considering floating the business, setting up shop across the Nullarbor and launching notebooks bearing the Portacom brand. "We're at a size where we're profitable and stable and could move to the Eastern States and float [on the ASX]," he says.
"We could become Australia's Dell with our own machines and service and support them. We're the oldest mobile brand in the country. Having this intimate knowledge of the industry Australia could have its own notebook brand.
That's my long-term goal."
He's scathing of state education departments spending money on what he says are under-powered netbooks running Intel's Atom processor.
"As far as I'm concerned the Atom is an underpowered CPU that needs to be replaced with decent performance dual-core processors, which I'm glad to say is happening this year."
He says the NSW Government's April decision to spend $150 million on 267,000 Lenovo Atom-base netbooks as part of its Digital Education Revolution compact with the Commonwealth was a "great buying exercise" but a waste of taxpayer money.
"I found it insulting that the state government expected a 10 percent failure and disappearance rate - they're prepared to lose $20 million to $30 million a year when kids put them on eBay."
And he says the $20 million spent with Adobe on video editing software was also wasted because the netbooks are incapable of performing those tasks acceptably.
Hancock says in WA there's "no interest in the cloud at all", referring to distributed computing accessed through the internet but that service, data recovery and business continuity are soaring in popularity with his customers, many of whom are small businesses, schools and in the mining trade.
And he's aided by vendors which he says don't want to deal with notebook problems originating in software, scrubbing hard drives even if the problem isn't there.
"When I started the business I saw service as a cost to the business but it has changed to become a profit centre for the business. I don't believe you can sell products without a service or support component, there's not enough profit left to market it."
Hancock is building an IT services business to support customers replacing desktops with laptops that have much higher failure rates such as from clogged fans, he says.
"People's expectations in service are going through the roof because they're relying on the computer; they don't understand backup and that a notebook needs regular servicing."
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