RALEIGH -- Software developers Margaret Mahoney and Graham Poor know the frustration of creating a product that never makes it into the hands of consumers.

"We spent two years working on a hand-held product that never made it to market," recalls Poor. "We were crushed. It was our first effort out of college. We put our hearts and souls into it."

Now, a half-dozen years later, this husband-and-wife team is trying to write a happy ending for their tale. They're putting their experience working with hand-held devices with tiny computer screens to good use at their eight-month-old start-up company, Bonita Software.

Bonita is based in Poor and Mahoney's two-story home, ordered out of a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog 80 or so years ago, in Raleigh's historic Oakwood district. But the company has its eyes on the 21st century.

Bonita is developing software for the next generation of wireless "smart phones" that are conversant in Java, the hot programming language from Sun Microsystems. These phones, which are to hit the market late this year or early 1999, will include miniature keypads and screens.

Bonita's ToGo software will be a personal information manager, or PIM. It will contain seven different applications: email, Web browser, phone directory, calculator, journal, scheduler and to-do list.

Bonita's game plan is to persuade hardware companies that are gearing up to sell millions of what have been dubbed "Java phones" -- companies such as Nortel, Alcatel, Ericsson and Nokia -- to include ToGo with their devices. It's a potentially lucrative niche that doesn't seem to have attracted much competition.

"We've done a lot of digging around," says Herbert Jackson of Richmond, Va.- based Renaissance Ventures, which is interested in investing in Bonita. "These are the only folks developing Java-based applications for smart Java phones."

Jackson was impressed by a demonstration of the still-developing ToGo software. "There are a lot of things you can do with it that you can't do with the Palm Pilot," he says, referring to 3Com's hugely successful hand-held device.

Many of ToGo's functions, such as Web browsing, are accomplished by linking up with a personal computer via modem.

"We like to say that ... we transcend the limitation of hand-held devices by leveraging the power of your home PC," Poor says.

The first generation of smart phones, such as the Nokia 9000 Communicator, perform many of the functions ToGo aims to accomplish. But Mahoney and Poor maintain that, by using the power of Java, ToGo will perform these functions better and more easily.

For example, with ToGo a user could fax a document dozens of pages in length -- too long for the current generation of smart phones. Similarly, with ToGo a salesperson in the field can remotely access a large corporate database and manipulate it.

These tasks can be accomplished because the documents in question don't have to be downloaded to a Java phone equipped with ToGo software. "You use a remote desktop computer to do most of the work for you," Mahoney says.

Bonita has put a lot of effort into developing shortcuts that will make Java phones easy to use despite their miniature keyboards. "In every area, we are absolutely going to minimize the number of keystrokes you have to hit," Poor said.

Mahoney and Poor, who previously were software developers at Newtonian Software in Raleigh, recognize that the Java phone market may not take off immediately when the phones hit the market late this year or early next year. So they're also developing a "tool kit" that companies can use to develop their own software applications for any mobile device that uses Java, such as a palmtop computer. Bonita also will use that tool kit itself to develop new applications that could be sold directly to Java phone users, such as a stock ticker or video games.

Mahoney and Poor are talking to venture capitalists to raise the financing they need -- they won't say how much -- to hire a management team that will launch ToGo. That includes hiring a chief executive to run the company.

"We want the best-trained person for every position in the company," Mahoney says. "Our training is in the technical area. ... We're not accountants, partnership makers, salespeople, marketers."



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