Philippe Khan is one of the tech entrepreneurs and visionaries who really defines the term successful serial entrepreneur and inventor. In the 1980s he was CEO of Borland, the company which made a number of programming tools and eventually purchased Paradox, the most-popular full-featured PC database program. TMC, the company where I am CEO ran on both Turbo C and Paradox in the eighties and I was the person in charge of the programming and running IT at the time. I first used Turbo C in college on a 286 clone that I believe ran at 10 or 12 MHz. Thankfully Turbo C was a fast compiler. To give you an idea of what connectivity was like at the time, the campus mainframe had a 300 baud modem connection.
I feel like I know Mr. Khan even though I have never met him because he made many of the tools I used when I was first introduced to computing.
What is more incredible is what he has done since those early days. In the mid-nineties he founded Starfish Software, a pioneer in the wireless synchronization market. The company was later sold to Motorola. Shortly thereafter he founded LightSurf – the first company to integrate the camera and phone. The company was later sold to Verisign then Syniverse Technologies.
In 2003 he founded Fullpower Technologies to focus on the convergence of life sciences, wireless technology, accelerometrics, nanotechnology and microelectromechanical systems. The company’s MotionX Technology platform powers many end-user solutions from the Nike+ GPS to the Jawbone Up band.
This is where the story converges as next week Philippe will be a keynote speaker at TMC event Wearable Tech Expo in Los Angeles and I will have the pleasure of meeting him in person – a great honor for me. In fact I think the entire keynote line-up will be quite memorable as we have Paul Gaudino of Adidas presenting as well as Cary Bran of PLT Labs/Plantronics and Dan Cui of Vuzix.
The show is four days away, December 10-11 and more excited to welcome you we could not be. Registration is open now and you can still register.
