Computing's clown prince hits the Net

On Tuesday, computing's clown prince enters the Internet age, and it just might be a Web-altering experience.

Nothing would make Mark Eppley happier than to make a difference with his new (old) company. On Tuesday he'll rip the cover from Traveling Software Inc. to reveal: LapLink.com. If it works the way he plans, we'll all get a lot happier when we get e-mail with attached files.

The 45-year-old entrepreneur, known for his Comdex Burnout parties, came out of retirement to go from PC pioneer to Netizen, in the process aiming to reinvent Traveling Software for the fourth time. He started the company in 1983, expressly to let early laptops and desktops exchange files without floppies. His product, LapLink, became a shibboleth in the DOS world as people LapLinked files to each other, and it became a must-have piece of software. In various iterations, it's sold 6.5 million copies, with countless more pirated.

Eppley himself became, if not exactly the clown prince of computing, at least the guy who told the go-go PC industry it was okay to relax once in a while. His presentations at major trade shows invariably drew belly laughs, and not because of glitches.

"Mark Eppley is the last interesting person in the computer industry," said one long-time industry observer, who asked not to be named. "Everybody else, they become suits, they're more worried about their IPOs and their stocks, they're all serious and they're pontificating, and this is the last guy who still has fun."

Boys just wanna...
How much fun? During Comdex Fall '94, at Traveling Software's 10th anniversary party (the company was actually 11, but Eppley said it had spent its first year in beta), the t-shirt and jeans-loving Eppley stunned the crowd by showing up in a tux, as a symbol of the company's new-found maturity. With a harpist strumming softly in the background, and an ice sculpture glistening to one side of him, he started a conventional stump speech, including slides.

The regulars heckled. Eppley bantered with the crowd, then suddenly ripped off the tux, revealing a t-shirt and skateboard pants. Then someone charged the stage and sledgehammered the ice sculpture. Out of nowhere, two sumo wrestlers rushed each other, only to fall backwards and holler "I've fallen and I can't get up." Eppley himself then hopped on a skateboard and rolled off the stage into another room, where a blues band began ripping out riffs. The anniversary party became a typical boisterous Burnout party, and the hecklers were, well, pleased.

Eppley's a great partier. His Comdex blues crawls became oases, since he threw out anyone who dared interrupt the music with talk of business. When he "retired" two years ago into the chairmanship of Traveling Software, the New York Times bemoaned the passing of the "Eppley Moment" from Comdex. Even the staid Wall Street Journal wrote an item this year on his annual summer Spam Jam.

Nobody gongs him
He also continues to have fun, even at work. At this year's Internet Showcase, he presented Traveling Software's new LapLink Enterprise Exchange Accelerator during the "Demo 'til you're dropped" segment, where presenters got six minutes to show off their product, if they didn't get gonged by a panel of judges.

Eppley came onstage as Clark Kent, and during his manic presentation morphed into Superman, using an inflatable life vest to automatically bulk up. He had the audience in stitches, and his was the only presentation that didn't get gonged. (Watch Eppley do his thing )

It was vintage Eppley, though he confessed last week that he had serious butterflies just before he went on stage.

"I'd been out of the industry for two years, and it dawned on me that there's 800 people out there, and I'm either going to go over really well, or I'm going to have to find another job."

'A great entrepreneur'
One of the judges wasn't surprised to see Eppley shine.

"He's just one of the most dynamic, exciting individuals you're going to meet," said Sheldon Laube, chairman and CEO of CenterBeam Inc., an IT outsourcer aimed at small businesses. "He was just so much better (than the others) in terms of being able to make a presentation and excite people about what he's doing. That's the sign of a great entrepreneur."

Despite being a CPA, Eppley has never lacked creativity. He advertised LapLink's Wireless edition by climbing to the top of Mt. Rainier and conducting file transfers from there (he also dragged up cans of Spam, which got his picture in a Spam biography). His products, such as the original LapLink and the Exchange Accelerator, consistently innovate in ways that certain large software vendors seem unable to do.

"He was one of the first people who . . . understood that (synchronization) was a fundamental enabling technology. So we can laugh at his antics, but he really was visionary and he did push a lot of products out of there," said Leslie Fiering, a long-time industry analyst now at Maples and Associates. "There were people who caught up to him or even surpassed him. But then he always went back and outdid himself again."

Not bad for a Seattle boy who was an All-City noseguard in high school and attended the Air Force Academy on a football scholarship (he later left due to the proverbial inability to agree on a strategic direction).

Setbacks
But then Windows caught on, and Traveling Software was late to the party. He ultimately developed a version of LapLink that added remote control and management features, though he never caught up to Symantec's PCAnywhere in the market.

Ultimately, he retired from day-to-day operations, leaving those in the hands of others. But even Eppley's friends say he's never been the best judge of management talent, consistently picking presidents who proved ineffective. Without him around, Traveling Software suffered, and insiders say it's struggling financially.

Eppley says simply that he didn't retire well, though he acknowledges that the company is down to 80 employees, from a peak of 140. He says he was thinking of a starting up a new company, and ultimately decided he'd reach more people if he reworked his old company to leverage its respected brand name, so he came back.

On Tuesday, when he unveils LapLink.com, he'll also roll out LapLink 2000, which he says will make file transfer much easier online. Eppley says LapLink 2000 is a complete re-write to the product, and LapLink.com will represent the most sweeping corporate change he's ever made.

"Going from a traditional software company to a Net company is a total change - if it was the same old business, I would lose interest," he says. When he first got back, he was encouraged to change the company name, to give it a new image. "But I was adamant that we would not make a name change until we were walking the talk."

He says the early signs are promising, as retailers have given pre-orders for the new product that exceed yearly sales for any of his previous editions of LapLink. He's out seeking venture capital and planning an IPO, which he says the company needs in order to compete effectively in the Internet market.

But his goal is to make LapLink again a verb, only now for the Internet generation. If that happens, you can bet that Mark Eppley will throw one hell of a party.