Qualcom chief Operating Officer Becomes CEO of Memjet – No products Yet

Wall Street Journal reports that Len 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.

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.

* Memjet has more than 600 employees, with about 400 of its engineers in Sydney
* Memjet has raised “hundreds and hundreds of millions” of dollars. Its biggest investor is Argonaut Private Equity.
* Memjet expects to start delivering products in the second half of this year, initially targeting office printers, label printers and other business applications
* Memjet has missed many deadlines before

Memjet website