Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the PalmPilot, is being honored by Cornell Sept. 22 as the 2000 Entrepreneur of the Year and will deliver an address at 4 p.m. that day on campus in the Statler Auditorium. The talk is free and open to the public.

Hawkins has been described as a visionary designer who virtually reinvented the hand-held computer market. He currently is chair and chief products officer of Handspring Inc., which he co-founded in 1998 with a colleague, Donna Dubinsky, and holds nine patents for various hand-held devices and features.

Handspring touts its palm-sized computers as "handheld information appliances that can change functionality to suit the task." Products are based on the same Palm operating system platform as Hawkins' PalmPilot but employ expandable hardware that allows add-ons through a Springboard&tm; device.

Hawkins launched the original PalmPilot line of products and founded Palm Computing in 1994. Palm products, for those who have never owned one, are devices the size of a large pocket calculator but much smarter. People use them to scribble down appointments, friends' addresses, a to-do list and notes on a palm-sized computer screen with a stylus -- a ballpoint pen without the ink. The device then translates the information to digital format, retrievable at the touch of a finger.

Hawkins' initial genius was to invent Graffiti, a simple text entry method that makes handwritten characters recognizable by software. Before that, hand-held devices like Macintosh's Newton garbled people's handwriting so badly that they were the brunt of jokes in "Doonesbury." Since that time, hand-held devices based on the Palm 0S platform used by Hawkins have become more sophisticated, offering infrared ports that allow communication between Palms, desktop computers and printers, and running the kinds of applications that used to be found only on a desktop computer. With a wireless modem, they can even be used to access the Internet

After his success with Palm Computing, Hawkins sold the company in 1995 to modem-maker U.S. Robotics. It has since been acquired by 3Com, a networking company. The word "pilot" was dropped from the names of products after a suit by the Pilot Pen Co. for copyright infringement was settled.Hawkins earned a B.S. in electrical engineering at Cornell in 1979. He held key technical positions at Intel Corp. and was vice president of research at GriD Systems Corp. before starting Palm. He is being honored by Cornell for his accomplishments.

The Entrepreneur of the Year award recognizes the achievements and qualities of a Cornellian who best exemplifies the ideals of entrepreneurship. Past award winners include Sanford I. Weill, Citigroup; David Duffield, PeopleSoft Corp.; Linda Mason, Bright Horizons Inc.; and Robert W. Felton, Indus International Inc. Recipients are selected by a committee of Cornell deans, faculty, students and alumni.

Entrepreneur of the Year was established in 1984 by Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management and is now managed by the universitywide Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise (EPE) Program. Founded in 1992 as a combined initiative of the Johnson School and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, EPE is governed by the deans of nine participating Cornell schools and colleges.

The talk by Hawkins, the award presentation and a reception that follows cap the Cornell Entrepreneur of the Year Celebration 2000, a two-day gathering that starts Sept. 21 on Cornell's campus and involves leaders and advisers of EPE and entrepreneurship faculty and students. Among the participants in this year's forums are Robert Swieringa, the Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean at the Johnson Graduate School of Management; David BenDaniel, the Don and Margi Berens Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Johnson School; and entrepreneurs John Alexander '74, MBA '76, Steven Belkin '69, Susan Holliday '77 and Murem Sharpe '70. At a luncheon Sept. 22, they will honor the late Don Berens '47, another former Entrepreneur of the Year (1993) and one of the founders of EPE. Berens also founded Hickory Farms Sales Corp. and, along with his wife, Margi, endowed the chair held by BenDaniel.