He's one of the more amusing guys in the history of Silicon Valley. I'm not bringing this up to trash Kahn, who is now working on another company called Fullpower. The Japanese giant isn't listed anywhere.
WHO INVENTED THE FLIP VIDEO CAMERA TRIAL
Moto is listed as the first trial for LightSurf. This also makes it seem pretty clear that Kahn was more solidly aligned with Motorola. LightSurf worked with J-Phone, the first company to come out with a service in November 2000, and Motorola, which followed a month later. If a cell phone photo falls in the forest, does it make a sound? Plus, the act of sending is what the Deltis did.ĭid he popularize it? Sure. When people think camera phone, they think of an object, not an incorporeal mode of behavior. "It was instant point, shoot and send," he said. Instead, Kahn argues that the camera phone is really not hardware, but the act of sending pictures. If you want a tenth anniversary, it should probably recognize one of these models. Kyocera did that in 1999, followed by Sharp in 2000. Kahn, though, admits that he didn't come up with a unified piece of hardware that could be called a camera phone. One could argue that the Deltis is really a camera that can connect to a cell phone, while Kahn made a camera phone. At the time, the Zaurus also had optional Internet connectivity.Īn early 1990s patent from Alcatel describes video cell phones, according to Jon Peddie, who ultimately credits Kazumi Saburi at Kyocera for starting his work in 1997. Sharp built a Zaurus handheld in 1996 that had a PCMCIA slot in which users could plug in an optional camera dongle, according to Casmir Decas, a handheld collector. "For example, it took 1 to 6 minutes to transmit one picture-sort of like waiting for a dial-up connection to the Internet." "The technology was good, but it left room for improvement," according to. In 1994, Olympus released a camera called the Deltis VC-1100, which contained built-in functionality that let users upload digital photos over cellular and analog phone lines. He just wasn't the first person to cross-breed the digital camera and the cell phone. The experiment eventually led to LightSurf, which he sold for $270 million to VeriSign in 2005. Kahn's wife did have a baby in January 1997 and Kahn did rig up all that stuff and post pictures to a Web site. Unfortunately, it's not completely accurate. USA Today, Wikipedia and other outlets have repeated the story. (By contrast, when my wife told me to shut up during labor, I went to get a Popsicle out of the fridge.) He linked his cell phone to a digital camera and then started posting pictures to the Web, effectively inventing the photo blog the same day. Kahn's wife told him to quit bugging her with his Lamaze advice, so he had his assistant go to Radio Shack and buy some wires, he told me. There's a heartwarming story making its way around the technology press about how Borland founder Philippe Kahn invented the camera phone in a hospital room while his wife was having a baby.