A contemporary history of vision, betrayal and the birth of the mobile internet

 

By Dr Theodor Heutschi

 

Prologue: The Snow of Helsinki

 

The winter of 2000 in Finland was particularly harsh. When Theodor Heutschi and his engineer Orest Goricanec landed at Helsinki Airport, snowfall had already brought all air traffic to a standstill. Long delays. Darkness. Freezing cold.

 

The two Swiss pioneers – one with a doctorate in diffusion theory, the other an engineer from Bellinzona – had nothing but a suitcase full of dreams and a working prototype device called Voyager. A device that was described in the patent application of 26 February 1998 as an ‘Electronic Device, Preferably an Electronic Book’ [1], but was in fact much more: a tablet computer with a touchscreen, mobile internet, GPS, Bluetooth, voice control and a virtual retinal display for 3D images directly onto the retina [1][2].

 

When they finally reached their hotel, they found themselves standing in front of locked doors. The night porter had already gone home. The two men stood in the Finnish winter for thirty minutes, calling in vain, until someone finally opened the door. They were exhausted, unprepared – and were due to face one of the most powerful technology companies in the world the next morning.

 

 

Chapter 1: The blueprint from Switzerland (1998 - 2000)

 

While Google was being founded in California and Steve Jobs was taking his first steps towards returning to Apple with the iMac G3 in Cupertino, Theodor Heutschi was working on something in Switzerland that would be a decade ahead of its time.

 

His patent US 6,335,678 B1, filed in February 1998 and published in January 2002, described a device with a hybrid-touchscreen (capacitive and resistive) just 1–3 cm thick that could display an entire book page on a screen [1]. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. The patent covered:

 

• Integrated mobile communication: GSM, HSCSD, GPRS, UMTS – in other words, everything that later became part of the smartphone

• GPS Global Positioning System Full-featured navigation system

• SIM card security: Copy protection for digital content via PIN-secured chip card

• Solar panel: Energy self-sufficiency on the go

• Hybrid-Touchscreen: Touch-operable with fingers or opionally wiht a stylus (capacitive and resistive)

• Voice control and video telephony

• VRD Virtual Retinal Display 3D visualisation with laser projection onto the retina

• Accessibility: Braille output and voice output for the visually impaired

• Dual processor architecture: Simultaneous operation of Pocket OS (Windows CE) and PC OS (Windows XP) [3]

 

Heutschi named his company MONEC Mobile Network Computing AG – founded in Bern in 1999 – and christened the device Voyager. It was not an e-book reader. It was not a PDA. It was not a mobile phone. It was all of these things combined, years before the term ‘smartphone’ was invented.

 

"Ten years before the Kindle and iPad", As later described on his website, Heutschi had drawn up the blueprint for the mobile age [4].

 

 

Chapter 2: The Birth of the Group (2000)

 

In 2000, Heutschi underwent a strategic transformation. MONEC Mobile Network Computing AG became MONEC Holding AG – a modern corporate structure with a clear division of responsibilities [5]:

 

 

 

Sohard AG was a strategic acquisition: an established Swiss software company that was intended to bridge the technological gap between hardware and software. Heutschi did not build a start-up – he built a corporation that would take the Voyager from prototype to mass production.

 

The vision was clear: mobile internet would only take off once it reached a critical mass of 25–27% market share – a finding from Heutschi's doctoral thesis that would later influence the go-to-market strategies of Apple and Google [4].

 

 

Chapter 3: The meeting of the titans – and their blindness (2000)

 

The conference room at Nokia headquarters in Espoo was modern, bright and impersonal. Six Nokia managers sat on one side of the table, with Heutschi and Goricanec on the other, still bearing the marks of their night-time odyssey through the snowstorm.

 

Heutschi presented the Voyager. He demonstrated the touchscreen interface, the icon-based operation, the ability to download books, newspapers and stock market data directly. He spoke of critical masses, of diffusion theory, of how mobile services would only take off once they had achieved a market share of 25–27%.

 

The Nokia managers listened. They smiled. Smugly.

 

And then they said the words that would go down in the history of technology:

 

       "This is a niche product. Perhaps a few tens of thousands of devices per year. We are focusing on the mass market."

 

Heutschi opposed them. He told them that there was no way around this device, that this was the future. The six Nokia managers laughed at him [6].

 

At the end of the meeting, they asked if they could keep one of the devices. Heutschi said no. Proudly. Or perhaps intuitively. He sensed that these people did not deserve his idea.

 

What he didn't know was that these six managers represented a company that at that time controlled 32% of the global mobile phone market, employed 60,289 people and accounted for 4% of Finland's GDP [7]. A company that, in its arrogance, believed that ‘connecting people’ was enough to secure its future. A company whose culture was later described by employees as ‘temperamental’ and ‘fearful,’ where bad news was not allowed to reach the top because top managers shouted ‘at the top of their lungs’ [8].

 

Nokia did not see the Voyager. They only saw their own dominance.

 

But they did not forget it either. The idea of a webpad – a tablet with internet access – remained in their minds. And Nokia was a company that sought partnerships to fill gaps.

 

 

Chapter 4: Nokia's Secret Partnership (2000 - 2009)

 

The rejection of the Voyager 2000 was not the end of Nokia's tablet ambitions. On the contrary, it marked the beginning of a decades-long search for the perfect webpad – always in partnership with the only company that had reasonably suitable software: Microsoft.

 

 

 

The irony was perfect: Nokia, which rejected Heutschi's Voyager in 2000 because it was ‘too early’ and ‘too complex’, was working nine years later with the very partner Heutschi had used for his device: Microsoft.

 

The secret Nokia webpad from 2009, which never appeared, had:

 

• A Microsoft operating system (like Heutschis Voyager 1999)

• A Stylus for input (like Microsoft's Tablet PC 2002)

• Mobile Internet (like Heutschi's Vision 2000)

 

It was as if Nokia and Microsoft had copied Heutschi's blueprint – but without the courage to implement it. The project was discontinued before it reached the market [11][12].

 

 

Chapter 5: The birthday party that changed everything (2002)

 

The 50th birthday of a Microsoft engineer. A party in Silicon Valley. The husband of a friend of Laurene Powell, Steve Jobs' wife. Jobs went reluctantly – he hated such social obligations [13][14].

 

There he met the Microsoft engineer. A man who – proud of his work – told Jobs about Microsoft's tablet PC initiative. Again and again. He had already told Jobs about it ten times, Jobs later told Walter Isaacson. And each time, he told him how Microsoft would change the world, how notebooks would disappear, how Apple should license Microsoft's software [13][14].

 

But the engineer made a crucial mistake – from Jobs' perspective:

 

       "He designed the device completely incorrectly. It had a pen. Once you have a pen, you're finished. [13][14]

 

Jobs came home. Angry. Annoyed. And said to his wife:

 

       "Screw it, we'll show him what a tablet can really do." [13][14]

 

The next day, Jobs went to his team and said, "I want to make a tablet, and it must not have a keyboard or a stylus." [13][15]

 

Admirable foresight: Heutschi's 1999 Voyager already featured a tablet with a functional hybrid touchscreen that could be operated with the fingers or optionally with a stylus (capacitive and resistive).

 

The connection to Heutschi: The Microsoft engineer who annoyed Jobs so much was influenced by that presentation in Helsinki two years earlier. By those six Nokia managers who rejected Heutschi's Voyager but couldn't forget the idea of a webpad. By the collaboration between Nokia and Microsoft, which in 2009 actually developed a webpad with a stylus – a device that never made it to market [11][12].

 

History is not a straight line. It is a tangle of missed opportunities, proud engineers and chance encounters.

 

 

Chapter 6: The Exodus (2001 - 2002)

 

The New Economy bubble burst in March 2000. By July 2002, the markets had wiped out seven trillion dollars in assets [16]. Credit Suisse, until then a proud investor in MONEC Holding, found itself in the most serious crisis in its history.

 

John Mack, the new CEO of Credit Suisse First Boston, was faced with a disaster in 2001:

 

         "Brian, I've got the biggest, most fucked-up company in the world right here" [17]

 

The losses were catastrophic: CHF -1.0 billion in 2001, CHF -1.2 billion in 2002. Credit Suisse First Boston had to cut 1,900 jobs [18]. Venture capital for tech start-ups – such as MONEC Holding – was frozen.

 

Heutschi was faced with an impossible choice: without fresh capital, the Voyager could not go into series production. The production subsidiary was at a standstill, R&D was running on a shoestring, and the Sohard subsidiary was burning through cash.

 

Then a private financier entered the picture. A former manager at Credit Suisse, he was already a private shareholder in MONEC and a shareholder through his company Bern Venture. The financier offered to take over Heutschi's share package with MONEC Holding AG and all its subsidiaries.

 

In 2002, Heutschi sold his shares. He left the company he had founded. The Voyager remained behind – unfinished, misunderstood, in the hands of a banker.

 

 

Chapter 7: The liquidation of Vision (2002 -2004)

 

What happened under the investor was not a continuation of the vision, but its dissolution:

 

 

 

The financier had no intention of building the Voyager. He did not see Heutschi's invention as the future of mobile internet, but rather as a legal asset to be exploited. The subsidiaries that Heutschi had worked so hard to build up were wound up. The engineers were dismissed. The production facilities were closed.

 

What remained was an empty shell: a Swiss letterbox with a portfolio of international patents – including the fundamental US 6,335,678 B1, which Heutschi had invented ten years earlier.

 

However, this case should be worth millions. Not because of the product, but because of its legal action potential.

 

 

Chapter 8: The Battle for Priority (2009 - 2012)

 

The breakthrough: licence agreement with HP (March 2009)

 

 

Even before Apple appeared on the radar, MONEC Holding AG achieved its first strategic success. In March 2009, the financier signed a global licence agreement with Hewlett-Packard (HP) [29]. HP, one of the world's largest computer manufacturers with deep expertise in printers and mobile devices, recognised the validity and value of Heutschi's patents - without a court case, without a public dispute.

 

The strategic victory: Global licence agreement with Apple (December 2009)

The annual report presented at the annual general meeting of MONEC Holding AG on 10 May 2009 confirms that the settlement with Apple in December 2009 resulted in a global licence agreement for all Apple products [29][30]. Not a one-off payment, not hush money, but comprehensive licensing - the implicit recognition that Heutschi's patents permeated Apple's mobile ecosystem.

 

 

The Meaning:

 

 

 

The failure in Delaware (2011 - 2012) - contextualised

 

"MONEC fails to explain how Defendants 'would have obtained' selective knowledge of a specific patent in a specific case"

 

The contrast is revealing: HP and Apple voluntarily recognised the value of the patents. Motorola, Samsung and HTC refused to do so, and MONEC's legal strategy was too weak to force them.

 

 

Chapter 9: The Conviction

Epilogue: The silent pioneer

 

Today, more than two decades after the Helsinki snowstorm, the conclusion remains the same:

 

The patents survived. US 6,335,678 B1 was cited in over 165 subsequent patents - including those of Apple, Samsung and Sony – as ‘fundamental prior art’ [4]. The blueprint I drew in 1998 can be recognised in every iPad, every Kindle and every smartphone.

 

The product died. The Voyager was never built. Not because it was technically impossible. Not because nobody wanted it. But because Nokia was too arrogant in 2000 to see it – and because my successors were too greedy in 2004 to build it.

 

The inventor became a contemporary witness. I am not the billionaire who made a fortune from mobile internet. I am the Swiss doctor who stood in the snow in Helsinki in front of closed doors while six Nokia managers laughed.

 

But I am also the man who said no when they wanted my device. The man who did not give up his patents when Apple wanted to destroy them. The man who today deeply condemns what his company has become – but is proud of what he created.

 

The Voyager never flew. But its idea circles the globe.

 

And history may yet remember who the true inventor was.

 

 

List of sources

 

Primary sources (own documents and certificates)

 

Secondary sources: Nokia, Microsoft & The Birthday Party

Secondary sources: Economic historical context

Secondary sources: Patent disputes & legal history

Secondary sources: Technology history & comparisons

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