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Philippe Kahn's new company: FullPower



I remember seeing Philippe Kahn for the first time in 1992, when I arrived (not on a boat) in the USA and started at Borland.   He struck me as a tall guy, oozing with enthusiasm, and came across very well.     That was a long time ago.  He founded Borland International, a company that built compilers (Turbo Pascal,  C, Delphi) and then went head to head with Lotus and Microsoft with Paradox, Quattro .v. Lotus 123.  It was a wonderful company to work for in the early 90's.

   After Borland, he started Starfish. The first product from Starfish was Sidekick for Windows, a product he purchased from Borland. Then it went into the sync business - syncing contacts, calendar and address books.   This was sold to Motorala.


After Starfish, came Lightsurf.   This was based in Santa Cruz, and pioneered the camera phone, working with Sprint as the provider for the end to end imaging.  It was a great success, and this company sold to Verisgn.

So walking in downtown Santa Cruz today, above Borders, I notice is his new company. FullPower is the name.  Not much more, except it takes quite a bit of space up (entire 3rd floor).      From reading the website, it looks like it will be doing some advanced development and innovations in motion detection for various areas - including games and health.  Think the Wii, Iphone applied to many other areas.

I wrote in 2006 about Philippe Kahn and an old article from 2001 that dissed him for showing a very early camera phone, at JavaOne.   It was a marvelous example of how often people dismiss great inventions.  In 2001, the camera phone demo at JavaOne worked well. But the press did not think anyone needed a camera phone:

Look at this quote... "And Philippe Kahn demonstrated some sort of a digital camera that could actually take a picture and send it across a network. Get real. Maybe I'm jaded, but I don't care that he was sending it across a phone network, without downloading it to a PC first."

Isn't that just interesting to read?  It was in 2001, reporting on a demo that Philippe Kahn did at JavaOne -- a demo of something we use all the time now - a camera phone.    This was not that long ago, yet the feedback from potential users was "can't do that" or "I'd have no use for it, I've got a PC".       


I wonder what he will invent this time. 


http://www.fullpower.com

Comments

Anonymous said…
Truly a man ahead of his time! I was a regular user of Turbo Pascal and was a big fan of his.

Vish
February 13, 2008 at 11:58 AM
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