January 27, 2007
Baby's arrival inspires birth of cellphone camera — and societal evolution
Kevin Maney for USA Today reports on the invention of the camera phones, 10 years ago.
"... Philippe Kahn's story of the origin of the cell-cam started when his wife, Sonia Lee, roared at him while spending 18 hours in labor. "I'd gone to the Lamaze classes," Kahn, now 54, tells me. "And the second time I said, 'Breathe!' Sonia said, 'Shut up!' So I said, 'OK, I'll sit at this desk and find something to do.' "
As his wife's labor went on, Kahn started fiddling with his hardware and writing code to glue it together. "I had time to make a couple trips to RadioShack to get soldering wire," Kahn says. "I just stayed in the room and made that thing work."
By the time he was holding his newborn daughter, Kahn could use his jury-rigged contraption to take a digital photo and wirelessly post it for his friends and family.
Motorola was in the process of buying Starfish, and Kahn says he first showed his invention to his new boss. But Motorola was just getting a new CEO (Chris Galvin) and embarking on one of the most ill-fated projects in global corporate history (the Iridium satellite phone system). Motorola passed on the cell phone camera.
Kahn formed a new company, LightSurf, to build and market PictureMail - a back-end system that would let a cell phone take a photo and send it somewhere. The first version came out in Japan in 1999, helping spur the Japanese to make the earliest cell-cams. Motorola and Nokia ended up being late to the cell-cam game."
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