(General Magic, Inc., Sunnyvale, CA) A former company founded in 1990 as a spinoff of Apple. It was established to create a platform for personal communications products and services and license the technology to a wide variety of manufacturers and service providers. It ceased operations in 2002 after an unsuccessful attempt to raise capital or achieve a strategic merger or acquisition.

General Magic's products included the Magic Cap operating system and Telescript programming language. The concept was to embed intelligence into e-mail and other applications to allow them to cooperate with one another and move messages intelligently through diverse public and private networks. One example of an application was a personal agent that could scour the Web and locate the best price for some desired item. The platform could be thought of as an early attempt at a type of Web services infrastructure, even before the Web had exploded.