Launched the world's first mobile personal assistant

Antony's role
Created the product concept, led product management, raised venture capital, co-founded and took a leading role in a new spin-off company.

The challenge
Find a way to use the newly launched USB standard to improve telephony.

The solution
Build a small office/home office micro-PBX for the US market that features advanced personal assistant and unified messaging logic running over USB to a home PC with a rich set of features including speech recognition and text-to-speech. CyberGenie would answer and forward calls, provide unified messaging, and set up calls and conferences via voice command. Antony holds several patents in the field of interactive speech recognition with visual feedback.

Results
With Taiwanese venture capital backing, Cygnion Corporation was spun out of Ericsson and launched at Comdex 2000. CyberGenie won numerous awards and received orders from over 2,000 retail stores throughout the US. With the channel filled with inventory and the team in the process of raising a second round of operational funding, the dotcom bubble burst and dried up all available investment capital. The cash flow ended the project prematurely.

Lessons learned
Hardware is a tough industry and cash flow is king. Sometimes it's better to start slow than to "go big" from day one, even if your investors pressure you to do so. If you can, stick to software.