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Why Qualcomm's Lauer Joined Little-Known Memjet

16.01.10

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.

Source: Wall Street Journal (blog)