Philippe Kahn's history of entrepreneurship is nearly as old as
the PC itself. He developed software for the Micral N, one of the
earliest commercial personal computers, back in 1973. As CEO of
Borland Software Corp. (BORL), he touted himself the "barbarian" of
the software industry and embraced that identity by holding one of
the first press conferences for his company in a McDonald's
restaurant in Las Vegas during Comdex. Ousted from Borland in 1995,
Kahn went on to found wireless synchronization outfit Starfish
Software, which he sold to Motorola Inc. (MOT). He followed that up
with LightSurf Technologies, a picture-messaging company acquired
by Verisign Inc. (VRSN) in 2005. Today Philippe Kahn is CEO of
Fullpower, a company developing accelerometer-based hardware and
software.
Walt and Kara welcome Kahn to the stage.
- Fullpower, says Kahn, has developed the MotionX Recognition
Engine, a technology intended to do for motion and gesture what
speech recognition did for speech. "We've created a system that
studies how you move as opposed to reacting to it."
- The first demo involves a headset with on-board motion
sensing. "Basically what we've done is build a motion-sensing
headset," says Kahn. The headset will differentiate between the
sources of motion of its user - if the user is walking, or running
for example.
- Kahn calls a colleague wearing the headset onstage. Colleague
begins walking and then running around the stage. The headset
tracks the users speed and distance and the user can tap it for
spoken updates about his or her progress.
- The device also notices whether its user is walking or
running, using its GPS and accelerometer. The same technology used
in the headset can be imbedded in phones and other devices.
- Moving on to the next demo, the same technology used for
camera image correction. The technology automatically sorts images
according to whether they require stabilization or not. And that's
it.