WSJ.com - Next Case for Palm Pilot Creators: The Brain

WSJ.com - Next Case for Palm Pilot Creators: The Brain: "The first time Donna Dubinsky and Jeff Hawkins worked together on a start-up in the 1990s, they invented the Palm Pilot and helped create the hand-held computer industry that generated more than $4 billion at its peak. Now the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are reuniting to create a business that mimics the complex world of the brain.
The co-founders of Palm Computing Inc. and Handspring Inc. are teaming up at Numenta, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based start-up that hopes to make a new kind of software that emulates the brain's memory system to solve problems. The ambitious effort differs significantly from past attempts to copy human thinking, the duo says, and is already yielding some early results.
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Ms. Dubinsky, who will serve as chief executive of Numenta, plans to remain a director of palmOne and software maker Intuit Inc. Mr. Hawkins is scheduled to spend two days a week on mobile computing at palmOne and the rest on Numenta. But he expects to scale back his day-to-day involvement with his Redwood institute.
"This isn't like our previous ventures. We won't be putting out a consumer product like the Palm Pilot," says Ms. Dubinsky. But there are some similarities, she says: "We're working together on a kind of next-generation computing.""