18-Jan-2003: Genesi needs You!

In a posting on Amiga.org Raquel Velasco and Bill Buck of Genesi announced among other things a big deal for Set-top-Boxes built using the Pegasos and MorphOS which delivers the necessary cash-flow for the next steps.

The team of bplan GmbH, the creators of the Pegasos and MorphOS, and Thendic-France SARL, the exclusive master distributor, will be merged into Genesi shortly. The Pegasos will be bundled with MorphOS, DebianPPC, Mac-on-Linux and suite of games and application software. OpenBSD and Gentoo ports are underway (available before CeBIT) and a Debian Development Team has been identified to create a special Pegasos distro. Discussions are underway for the following OS ports to the Pegasos: BeOS, OpenBeOS, NetBSD, Zeta, and NewOS. SuSE and Mandrake (we will see what happens there) are already running on the Pegasos. Many things still need to be done and we are interested in all constructive involvement. The idea is to rally a technically oriented community to the Pegasos before a mass-market for the Pegasos is attempted. We hope by taking this intermediate step the Pegasos will be more competitive with the BIGGER companies in the IT field. By the way, we will continue to fully support any effort to bring AmigaOS or AmigaDE to the platform (in fact, we have taken the necessary legal steps anyway to make sure this will happen since working cooperatively together has not been possible).

We are looking for Developers and highly motivated individuals who want to establish Development Teams and User Groups. In both cases, we will be offering special pricing on the Pegasos, CPU and OS upgrades, and peripherals, as we move ahead. There will be special aspects of our support sites that will provide the latest updates for any aspect of the platform online. We will have a software download section soon. Developers will be paid for their work, as many have discovered already. We are committed to moving ahead in big way. Tell us what you want to do – there is plenty of opportunity!

If you decide you want to become involved www.pegasos-usa.com up and running. Please check it out. This is a model we want to franchise. We would like to have www.pegasos-?????.com up and running soon too, for example, www.pegasos-italy.com, www.pegasos-newzealand.com or www.pegasos-nevada.com. When you click on support look where you go…. We are interested in establishing Distributors and User Groups in every possible location. These can also be linked through the site. For User Groups and Distributors, we can even register and supply the URL, the sources for the website and even web-hosting if necessary. We will support our chosen partners with the necessary resources as required -- if someone else has registered a URL already we will create an alternate and official domain. NOTE: the final URL for these associated sites has NOT yet been determined. You can find an interesting User Group site here: www.dijidesign.com/spug.

Going forward, further information can be found at www.pegasosppc.com, www.morphos-news.de, www.thendic-france.com (this site has already begun the transformation) and www.bplan-gmbh.de. We just hired an internationally experienced Management Team (resumes can be read at www.crossbee.com) and the integration/coordination work between the companies, the development teams, and the marketing plans have begun. We will be moving into new offices in Paris, Frankfurt, and Luxembourg shortly.

The Pegasos was featured last week at the world's largest Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The Genesi Booth was found in the Break-Through Technologies Pavilion, South Hall, Booth #29101. We will have a complete Show Report online soon. CES is the current culmination of our announced Show schedule. You can see where we have been at www.pegasosppc.com under “Events.” Before we venture out in mass again, we will be putting a solid marketing plan into place. Shows like CES are expensive. Between CES and Aachen we spent nearly $100,000 sharing our message and our commitment to the platform (not to mention the cost of the other public demonstrations/event support). We are thinking that it may be better to bring our Developers on a working “vacation” rather than to fund the next big Show. In the meanwhile, we will fully support User Groups as we did last weekend in Finland. We really appreciate the support we have in Finland and the capable and intelligent people there.

About the future, Genesi has been contracted (and we mean revenue) to build a DTV set-top box using the PPC and MorphOS. This opportunity has created the necessary cash flow and business case to spawn the next level of our success. Strategically, we are continuing ahead with our vision of the eclipsis and the Pegasos will get better and better as the PPC evolves and MorphOS continues to be refined and improved (and thankfully it all ties into smart cards). Things are looking very “cool.”

The Pegasos and Genesi will be successful; we hope you will consider being part of it all. Please send us an email at bbrv@genesi.lu and we will do our best to answer you thoughtfully and positively.

Sincerely,
Raquel and Bill.