Imagine interactive holograms in living rooms, self-driving vehicles on the nation’s highways, and sophisticated tracking sensors everywhere.
Welcome to life in the not-too-distant future, which will be full of such innovations, says Henry Samueli, Broadcom Corp.’s chairman, chief technology officer and sometime futurist.
“They will become a reality over the next 15 years,” Samueli declared during a far-reaching keynoter at IEEE Globecom in Anaheim this month.
The Irvine-based chipmaker cofounder and visionary walked the audience through industry history and pointed to its fascinating future. Applications soon will allow users to interact with their TV through hand motions, while holographic cameras mounted on TVs will emit interactive 3D images, he suggested.
“The user interface will definitely change dramatically in the next 15 years,” Samueli said. “What we’re going to see is your home set-top box becoming this multiservice, universal gateway platform.”
Sensors will pervade our environment to monitor our health, our pets, and electrical and geological systems, he said.
“Any kind of sensor will be universally connected,” Samueli added.
And forget about carrying money, credit cards or even keys. Your smart phones soon will take over those functions, he predicted.
“There are an unbelievable number of new applications that will keep us busy for the next 20 years,” Samueli told the crowd of engineers and academics in attendance.
Kodak Patents
Newport Beach-based Acacia Research Corp. made some inquires about the patent portfolio up for grabs as part of Eastman Kodak Co.’s bankruptcy reorganization.
But ultimately, the Newport Beach-based investor decided the price required to acquire the patents would be too high. The Rochester, N.Y.-based company’s auctioned patents—related to imaging, manipulation and digital file sharing—are expected to fetch about $500 million. Mountain View-based Google Inc. and Cupertino-based Apple Inc. reportedly have partnered to offer that sum for the patents.
Other suitors include Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., Intellectual Ventures Management LLC in Bellevue, Wash., and San Francisco-based patent buyer RPX Corp.
“At that price from a licensing standpoint, that wouldn’t leave a whole lot of upside,” said Acacia Chief Executive Paul Ryan. “That’s fair value for strategic buyers.”
Acacia licenses patents from its own portfolio and for other companies, typically splitting sales, licensing fees and court settlements with patent holders.
Kodak’s demise hits close to home for Ryan, who grew up in upstate New York. He called the company’s inability to evolve and capture patent sales before it was too late a “real shame and tragedy.”
“It’s hard for large companies with a huge position to pivot but you have to,” Ryan said. “They waited too long on their patents.”
In July 2011, Apple, Microsoft and Research In Motion Ltd., the Canada-based maker of BlackBerry phones, led a group that purchased a patent portfolio from Canada-based Nortel Networks Corp. for $4.5 billion in cash. The group outbid Google in a deal that brought the companies key technologies for mobile phones and tablets.
Google went on to buy Libertyville, Ill.-based Motorola Mobility Holdings Inc. in August 2011 for $12.5 billion. The former Motorola mobile devices division brought Google more than 17,000 patents.
$1 Salaries
STEC Inc. Chief Executive Mark Moshayedi and his brother Manouch Moshayedi, a founder, have cut their annual salaries to $1 amid a general campaign of company cost-cutting. STEC has been hit with a rash of negative headlines this year, including recent downgrades and a management shake-up.
Manouch Moshayedi is fighting insider trading charges levied by the Securities and Exchange Commission that prompted his resignation from his positions at STEC but hadn’t affected his salary. He has denied charges in a filing in U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.
STEC makes flash memory drives for corporate data networks. The products are known as solid-state drives since they have no moving parts, unlike traditional disk drives.
The SEC charged Manouch Moshayedi with violating anti-fraud provisions of U.S. securities laws. It seeks a judgment ordering him to relinquish trading profits and to pay prejudgment interest and financial penalties, and also seeks to bar him from serving as an officer or director of any registered public company.
STEC’s board elected Mark Moshayedi—who previously served as president, chief operating and technical officer, and director—to take the chief executive’s post on an interim basis.
Kevin Daly, STEC’s lead independent director, is serving as interim chairman.
The SEC said in July that it had eliminated STEC and Mark Moshayedi from any part of the insider-trading investigation.
