When I founded
MCRL a couple of years ago the main product we were focusing on was the PSA, the Personal Shopping Assistant. We generated a lot of headlines and even managed to sell it to two different super market chains, but it was never deployed in massive quantities.
Even though we did not get much back for our hard work, we managed to make quite an impact on the retail industry by demonstrating the product on all major trade shows. Both Wincor Nixdorf and IBM are marketing similar products now that the market has matured. Today I found out via a press release on the Microsoft Website that Fujitsu is now also marketing a similar product.
I am not bitter, but it is quite interested that all parties who are now offering these products visited our offices over the last couple of years to 'partner' with us. Haha, I can laugh about it now.
I have to admit that I did not invent the concept of the PSA as a number of companies have been experimenting with the concept, unsuccessfully, since the early 1990's.
Some of my friends are still working on similar devices, however they focus more on handheld PDA units.