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Musings from Philippe

Sailing, Mountains, Music, and Technology

Inventor Philippe Kahn on Audacity, Talent, and Luck

An email interview with the serial entrepreneur behind the technology inside the Jawbone Up fitness-tracking wristband.

Lewis Schiff, Inc.com

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In 1983, Philippe Kahn emigrated from France to the United States with just $2,000, and a software program he co-created called Turbo Pascal. The company he built around that program, Borland International, sold for $75 million in 2009.

As a Silicon Valley pioneer, he’s been known for developing cutting-edge products such as one the first camera phones and, more recently, the technology inside Jawbone’s “Jawbone Up” fitness tracking wristband. Today, he’s founder and CEO of Fullpower Technologies.

Inc. Business Owners Council’s Lewis Schiff recently interviewed Kahn by email:

You are known as one of the swashbuckling entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley. In my book, Business Brilliant, I wrote about one of your early business adventures launching Borland. When you arrived from France with no money to market Turbo Pascal, you relied on a high-stakes ruse to fool the leading computer magazine, Byte, into extending you credit in order to pay for advertising. What other bold business tactics have you used?

Another story, and perhaps a more important event as it put me in contact with the key technology influencers of the time, is my first press conference. It was at the Las Vegas Comdex show a few months [after I convinced Byte magazine to run my advertisements on credit]. I asked the–now famous–casino mogul Sheldon Adelson for credit for a small booth and a press conference. He said, “if you can’t afford to pay me upfront, perhaps you should ask McDonald’s.” That wasn’t meant seriously, but I thought about it and I set up my first press conference in Las Vegas at McDonald’s! Ten journalists came and among them, Jerry Pournelle, who wrote my technology up and got me started with orders pooring in. Jerry became a sort of father figure. And I was star-struck. I loved his book, The Moth in God’s Eye.

That’s an amazing story of business guts.

I didn’t have a choice. I had to get creative. What else could I do? I’m not a business guy; I’m a technologist. My family was blue collar. We had a cabinet shop in a part of Paris where we needed to fend for ourselves. If we didn’t make or sell a piece of furniture, there was no pocket money. That was my business school. In my family, I had no choice but to get straight A’s in math and science, which opened doors for me. Dropping out was not an option.

Until I came to the Silicon Valley, I never quite knew that I had a mind for business. My mind is that of a scientist and technologist by training who knows that lasting value comes from technology, intellectual, property, and patents. But it’s the same thing as my family’s cabinet shop. People from fancy neighborhoods would order custom armoires and dining room sets because of my grandfather’s cabinet-making skills. That paid our rent. He was a great artist. He could make anything. We got to install furniture in amazing Paris apartments. I always wanted to be like him: a great craftsman. So, like his skill was with woodwork, mine became technology invention and innovation.

Would you say that you built your businesses through your talents? Your vision? Or your salesmanship?

It starts with hard work, of course. That’s a given. Luck first, vision second, and skills third. If I was a great salesman, I would have built Oracle or Microsoft. I wasn’t. So I built successful smaller technology leading companies. With the camera phone, I learned that it was best for large established companies to sell and market our innovation. Now I realize this approach complements what we do. We do this with companies such as Nike, Comcast, Pioneer, JVC, and others. I should have partnered earlier and more with sales/marketing people like we do today: Our latest partnership where we invented and created the end-to-end Jawbone Up wearable device for Jawbone is a success with iPhones and Android devices. The Jawbone team is the best at packaging, sales, and marketing. That complements perfectly our innovation, technology, patent, and IP portfolio. It’s the mythical “win-win.”

What are you really good at?

I’m a practical inventor, technology visionary, and I make things work with the components that I have. I’m good at creating a practical future like the camera phone or the “quantified self” (the technology inside the Jawbone Up). I’m an excellent team player and leader and I never give up. I take the best care of my team. I’m not good at sales pitches, corporate-IPO presentations, or marketing spin. I am not a very patient person as I want results fast.

How did you discover what you’re good at?

Perhaps that is what we call maturity, knowing what we are good at?

As you were coming up the ranks did you spend time doing things that you’re not good at?

Yes, I ran a public company that I had founded, for 12 years, with more than 3,500 employees, and I had to do a lot of corporate stuff. I could do it and I did but I didn’t like it. I had no passion for it. Without passion it’s just not worth it. I have passion for technology and invention. There are plenty of great managers.

Does “luck” play a role in your success?

Yes, the harder one tries, the luckier one gets. Luck can be fragile. Luck in life is infinitely precious. I feel incredibly lucky.

 

The original article can be read here:
Inc.com/lewis-schiff/philippe-kahn-inventor-turbo-pascal-jawbone-up.html


Santa Cruz tech company founder forecasts revolution in health sciences

Santa Cruz Sentinel

SANTA CRUZ — Fullpower Technologies, a Santa Cruz company behind the award-winning technology in iPhone and iPad applications that monitors sleep patterns and physical activity and provide GPS locations, services and directions, recently announced new patents that are shaping the next generation of wearable medical devices.

“The next social paradigm-shift is noninvasive wearable wireless medical devices and applications,” said Philippe Kahn, founder and chief executive officer of Fullpower. “… Dick Tracy had a watch that did everything. The key is real inventions with real innovation.”

Click here for the full article

 


Fullpower® Receives Key Patents Covering MotionX Technologies For Wearable Non-Invasive Medical Devices

SAN FRANCISCO, CA–(Marketwire – Jan 7, 2013) – Fullpower® today announced it has received a collection of patents covering key breakthrough technologies for wearable non-invasive medical devices.”The next social paradigm-shift is non-invasive wearable wireless medical devices and applications,” said Philippe Kahn founder and CEO of Fullpower. “It’s all about invention, innovation and IP. The combination of synergistic inventions and innovation are game-changers.”

 

 

An Example related to outbreaks, epidemics and the optimal use of pharmaceutical drugs such as Tamiflu®

The patent for invention number 8,187,182 outlines a method and apparatus using sensor fusion for accurate activity identification, and the patent for invention number 7,705,723 outlines a method and apparatus to provide outbreak notifications based on historical location data. Leveraged together, a device containing multiple sensors to collect patient-state information, geospatial data, and other sensor data may be used to calculate information about the active state of the user that is more accurate than would be possible using standalone sensors. This data may in turn be used to issue accurate and effective outbreak notifications.

For example, If an individual is identified as a point source of disease, the patented system can backtrack all potential contact points for the affected individual and notify anyone who was potentially in close contact. Furthermore, the data collected can be used to identify areas that may be affected, paths of intersection, quarantine, distributions of medicine such as Tamiflu® (SIX: RO, ROG; OTCQX: RHHBY), along with a map of the outbreak. A system such as this enables the real-time understanding, management, and containment of outbreaks of disease, including potential pandemics.

The Fullpower Patent Portfolio

These patents are part of an intellectual property portfolio from Fullpower-MotionX that includes more than 36 issued patents with dozens of patents pending. Broad coverage for the MotionX Technology Platform introduces a new and necessary approach for sleep, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, and epidemics. These advanced methodologies can enhance the potential of pharmaceutical drugs such as Ambien® (SNY) or Zocor® (MRK), for example. Fullpower’s continued innovation translates into constantly broadening and deepening of the IP related to the MotionX patent portfolio for non-invasive wearable wireless devices.

About Fullpower and the MotionX Technology Platform

Founded in 2003 by a world-class team, Fullpower’s MotionX technology platform leads the wearable technology revolution. The MotionX Technology Platform is a suite of tightly coupled and integrated firmware, software and communication components that are the building blocks for new breakthrough non-invasive, wearable wireless devices. With a broad IP portfolio including several dozen patents, the MotionX Technology Platform powers leading solutions from companies such as Nike, Jawbone, Apple, Comcast, Pioneer, JVC, and others. Fullpower showcases its MotionX Technology Platform via its iPhone and iPad applications, which lead the iTunes store in the Medical, Health & Fitness and Navigation categories.

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MotionX Introduces Sleep by MotionX v4.0 for iPhone, Correlates Resting Heart Rate with Sleep Quality

Medical-class iPhone application first to offer sleep monitoring, resting heart rate, and activity monitoring to help improve Sleep

SANTA CRUZ, CA – (Marketwire – November 29, 2012) – Fullpower®-MotionX® today announced Sleep by MotionX version 4.0, the first app for the iPhone that measures resting heart rate and correlates resting heart rate with sleep quality.

Sleep by MotionX encapsulates seven years of research and development in the biomechanics of natural human motion and sleep optimization to bring the best professional medical-class tool to the iPhone. Sleep by MotionX provides the tools to help improve your sleep in a natural and non-invasive manner.

It is the first solution for iPhone that:

  • Helps measure and correlate resting heart rate with sleep quality
  • Provides the most advanced and accurate sleep-cycle alarm solution
  • Implements smart alarms for optimal length power-naps for the first time on any device
  • Delivers advanced automatic “Get Active” alerts

 

“We carefully analyzed the feedback of tens of thousands of active MotionX users to take sleep monitoring and optimization to the next level,” said Philippe Kahn founder and CEO of Fullpower-MotionX. “We integrated a very accurate heart rate monitor with our sleep monitor to track resting heart rate which research shows can be an indicator of overall health.”

Sleep by MotionX is available at $9.99 from the App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/motionx-sleep/id505074676?mt=8. The upgrade to version 4.0 is free for the tens of thousands of current Sleep by MotionX users.

Read more at Fullpower.com


MotionX-GPS Drive named “Best iPhone 5 App for Drivers”

Total Car Score

LOS ANGELES, Sept. 17, 2012 /PRNewswire/ — Total Car Score (www.totalcarscore.com), the most comprehensive automotive ranking and comparison website, today released its list of the Top 5 iPhone Driving Apps in anticipation of the release of the new iPhone 5.

“With the release of the iPhone 5, drivers will have an excellent selection of useful and fun driving aids,” said Karl Brauer, Editor in Chief of Total Car Score. “Beyond the new iPhone 5’s larger display screen and excellent native apps, these are our favorite driving-related apps. All of the apps in the list, with the exception of MotionX® GPS, are free in the App Store.”

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Read the entire press release at Fullpower.com


Honolulu Fire Department (HFD) Saves Lives With MotionX

The Honolulu Fire Department (HFD) Search & Rescue division has been using MotionX-GPS on the iPhone as a critical time-saving navigation tool during search and rescue alarms. Due to the often treacherous Honolulu terrain, distress calls from hikers and tourists in trouble is a daily occurrence.

When hikers or tourists call 9-1-1 from their mobile phone, their location coordinates are automatically transmitted to the emergency response team. HFD Search & Rescue inputs the lat/lon coordinates into MotionX-GPS and navigates to the waypoint using a combination of team members on foot crossing the rugged terrain, and by air in mountain rescue helicopters.

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Read the full article at Fullpower.com


Philippe Kahn’s First Camera Phone Set to Star in Best Buy Super Bowl Ad

All Things D – Feb 6, 2012 – by Ina Fried.

If you want to learn more about the first camera phone, the Super Bowl could be your chance.

Inventor Philippe Kahn talks about it in a Best Buy ad running in the first quarter. In a promotional video that ties in to the ad, Kahn shows his first photo, of his newborn daughter, and talks about how the technology came to be.

While not the first time a camera had been attached to a phone, Kahn notes his camera phone allowed the modern notion of instant sharing.

These days Kahn is running Fullpower Technologies, which does some motion control stuff demoed back at our D7 conference. Their MotionX software is a popular iPhone navigation app and their technology is also used in devices like Jawbone’s UP and Nike+ GPS.


Fullpower introduces the MotionX-Recognition engine for mass-market devices

The next paradigm shift for mobile is “sensing”. The Nintendo Wii as well as screen rotation on the iPhone are examples of simple implementations of motion sensing in mass market devices. To build more advanced sensing solutions, the challenge is similar to that of speech recognition: It takes a lot of technology to get it right.

Over the past five years Fullpower has developed the MotionX Recognition Engine, designed to accurately solve the challenges of gesture recognition, pedestrian navigation, and image stabilization among others.

In a nutshell, the MotionX Recognition Engine is to motion what a great speech recognition engine is to speech.

At the D7 conference Fullpower is presenting two real-world implementations of the MotionX Recognition Engine:

Presentation 1, The MotionX-Headset: Complete motion user experience and gesture recognition as well as pedestrian navigation. TapTap™ commands, ShakeShake® commands, power management and accurate measurement of distance and speed traveled using pure accelerometrics.

Presentation 2, MotionX-Imaging: Full image stabilization using pure smartphone accelerometrics (something that is reputed impossible to do without expensive specialized sensors and electronics). This solution scales infinitely to very high resolution imaging sensors.

Based in Silicon Valley, Fullpower is the world leader for mobile sensing solutions and develops technology and IP with an embedded licensing business model.


Emailing the Father of the Camera Phone as He Sails Across the Great Blue Pacific

“Your uncle Invented the Camera Phone!?” is what I said before a friend introduced me to Philippe Kahn. Back in 1997, Kahn hacked together a camera phone to easily send photos of his newborn daughter to family and friends. That piece of lore is gadget history 101. What many people don’t realize is that Philippe is also a fanatic sailor. We’re not talking cushy megayachts: Kahn engages in top level competitive racing, in 2003 beating Roy Disney to win the Transpac race from Long Beach to Hawaii. As we speak, he’s on the same journey in a smaller, lithe, double-handed (two man) on the Team Pegasus Open 50, making a play for the speed record. We just emailed him…and mid race, he wrote back.

It’s his tenth crossing, but apparently, the weather is trickier than on his other trips, with two tropicals storms forming in the area. Despite all that, he answered our questions, from the middle of the great blue Pacific Ocean, about the boat, and how exactly you stay sane and connected in the open sea.

How do you stay connected out in the ocean?

It’s hard to type… Small boat, big motion, big fingers… So excuse the typos etc…There are several satellite communications systems; weight and power consumption matter a lot. The practical ones for a project like this are the Iridium network and the Inmarsat Fleet-33 system. The bandwidth is limited, to say the least: 2400 baud for Iridium, 9600 baud for F-33s, but Iridium is far more reliable and completely global. The challenge is also that these systems lose their connections. And of course, with that kind of latency, all standard email and download systems fail and get into endless loops. Latency just kills them as they try to eternally restart operations that never complete. We use systems that pick-up where they started after a connection is dropped to remedy those short comings. Yes, those systems are generally ‘line of sight ‘ and as long as there is not a massive storm it will work well, similar to Direct-TV. Iridium and Inmarsat are the main makers. They are not really water resistant, but pretty rugged. We protect it carefully. Everything is redundant on the boat except the F-33 that is a luxury that we enjoy once in a while when it works.

Tell me about the Boat.

The boat is all ultra light made out of the strongest and lightest pre-preg carbon fiber, the same methodologies of fabrication as the Boeing Dreamliner. The small cabin-pod that you can see on the drawing has a roof-top made out of kevlar so that it is not a Faraday cage. As the rest of the boat is made of carbon and there are many sensitive parts, like high precision stabilized compasses, running networks for sharing information between sensors and devices is tricky. We end-up using Cat 5 wiring, ethernet-style. And that is what connects the sat phones to the laptops and how I am sharing these emails with you. This is like a little spaceship. In fact, that is what people say when they see the boat. It’s made for two guys who want to work hard and take some risks to compete with fully crewed yachts with tens of professionals sailing. So it is light and designed to make everything doable by two.

How are you charging you gear? What kind of electrics are on the boat? Does the weight hurt your performance?

The boat has high performance batteries that get recharged by running the main engine as a generator. We run the engine a couple of hours a day to get enough charge. Weight is the enemy in these kind of boats. So we keep everything to the bare minimum.

What would the difference be without all the electrics?

The Sextant is a super handy Gizmo. Yes, you can get a $99.95 GPS and think that you know where you are, but you wouldn’t know about the stars, the planets, the moon and the sun as you do if you are proficient at finding your position anywhere in the world with a sextant. And that is really where we are, in the midst of the stars and the planets. That’s where we live…

I combine my Tamaya sextant with their celestial calculator so that I don’t need to carry all the site reduction tables. I tell you, at a party with smart hip people, you get more attention with a sextant than you got attention with an iPhone a month ago. Kids love it. Sophie, our 10 year old, is always eager to go and take a planet or a star site. It’s really fascinating to her.

I have a Suunto watch with a barometer, my sextant and always with us a hand bearing compass. If all fails, that will work. It’s important to know how to use those tools and like them.

How are you and co-sailor Richard Clarke taking shifts?

We really are flexible. Right now, I’m on watch, trimming, checking, navigating, taking care of things, writing email… I’m letting Richard sleep as long as he needs to because conditions are fairly stable. When things get hairy, none of us gets any sleep. It’s an exercise in sleep deprivation.

[From the blog: “by the way, we get both less than 4 hours of sleep every 24 hours”]

The blog is interesting to read, coming from someone interested in gear (and sailing), but more than that, for geeks who want to get away from their desks without getting away from their toys. (Gadgets & Ocean = A nice life.) At some point during the race, Kahn went further South than anyone else in the race to see if he could take advantage of the winds from some a pair of tropical storms. (I think.) Overnight, the wind died completely, becalming the boat, while other times, there was so much turbulence that lots of water was washing washing up on deck. And a day ago, all the electronics on the boat went haywire and they had to replace them all with a pair of laptops. The blog talks a lot about the gear Richard and Philippe are using, switch up their playlists on their iPods and iPhones. (I think that’s an iPhone first, being in a race.)

When Philippe gets back, I’m going to have to drill him about his current project, in stealth right now, over at Fullpower. No one knows what it is, yet, but I’ll let you know as soon as I find out. [Transpac 2007 Open 50 Double Handed Record Attempt]

Disclaimer: Philippe is the uncle of a friend of mine, and I’ve crashed on the family couch a few times in Tahoe.

Philippe Kahn founded Borland, invented the Camphone, and decodes human motion. He’s also a fellow outdoorsman, splitting time skiing Tahoe and sailing in Santa Cruz. He’ll share his Transpac 2009 sailing race with us live from the Pegasus Open 50. He and Richard Clarke set the race record for a double handed team in 2008 with a time of 7 days, 15 hours, 17 minutes and 50 seconds, besting all boats in overall time for that year.
[Previous Pegasus Sailing posts on Gizmodo, Pegasus]


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