James Chu

Viewsonic

Chu founded Viewsonic in as Keypoint Technology Corp, an importer of keyboards and other computer peripherals from Taiwan to the US market. By 1993 he decided the part of the computer that consumers related to best was the computer monitor and narrowed the focus of his company to only monitors, changing the name of the company to Viewsonic and selected "a trio of garishly colored gouldian finches as the company logo". The company would go on to become one of the largest brands in monitors and in 1999 had 6.9% of the market share in the US, ranking 5th nationwide behind competitors Dell, Compaq, Gateway and Hewlett-Packard.

Web Sonic

As early as 1997 Chu sought to diversify the product lines of his business from monitors to become an early starter in the smart display industry. He was influenced by ideas circulated by Oracle's Larry Ellison and Sun Microsystems's Scott McNealy envisioning inexpensive networked computers and in response created the Web Sonic subsidiary to create displays whose main function was as an Internet appliance. Web Sonic's first product launched in 2000 was a 5-pound Web phone with a touch sensitive color screen that could access the Internet and had an e-mail indicator light to alert users to messages. In a 2000 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he also revealed the company was working on a "wireless 'Web pad' about the size of an 8 1/2-by-11-inch note pad that would sell for about $1,500".