Born (Yet) Again

Leave it to Philippe Kahn to start a new business in a maternity ward.

While he was cooing over his newborn daughter three and a half years ago, the proud papa decided he needed to share his new baby's image with friends and family around the world. Armed with a digital camera in one hand and a cell phone in the other, Kahn figured out how to make the two devices work together.

"Everyone thought I was the best father in the maternity," he says. "I spent two days there, and I was really making the system work."

Shortly thereafter, Kahn and his wife, Sonia Lee, gave birth to another offspring: LightSurf Technologies, a company that is trying to merge photography and wireless devices. LightSurf is the latest in a string of business ideas that have sprung from the mind of the 48-year-old Kahn, who cut his technology teeth back in the early 1970s when he started working on developing friendlier versions of the Pascal programming language.

Kahn has made a career out of raising successful companies and tapping into technologies just on the verge of mass recognition. That's what he did at Borland International, a PC software house that he started in 1983, just one year after emigrating to the U.S. from his native France. Borland played a significant role in the development of user-friendly PC software in the 1980s, but it ultimately fell victim to a more market-savvy competitor: Microsoft. Kahn left Borland in early 1995, after the PC software wars took their toll on the company.

Kahn's approach now is to accentuate the positives that came out of his Borland experience. "Competition, although tough and stressful, always ends up making one stronger, making the technology better and making the markets more efficient," he says. "Microsoft's presence has helped create challenges for people like myself to evolve better, think faster and build better technology."

More Starfish in the sea

Even before he officially left Borland, Kahn had started the ball rolling on his next venture: Starfish Software, a company he founded with his wife in 1994. Back then, Kahn and Lee saw a future that included wireless Internet applications, and they saw Starfish as a developer of synchronization tools for those apps. Eventually, Motorola saw the same thing and bought Starfish from Kahn in 1998 for $253 million, although Kahn remains the company's CEO.

Borland and Starfish gave Kahn a financial independence that he says allows him to pursue technology plays on his terms. "Most companies are more focused on the marketing than on building core technology that can be leveraged," he says. "I feel very fortunate that I don't have to jump through hoops to make something complete."

Money also has helped Kahn pursue some passions outside the tech world. At Borland, he recorded a couple of jazz albums as a flutist. He now is a competitive sailor with a small fleet of sailboats, each called Pegasus.

LightSurf, launched in February 1998, is aimed at extending Kahn's concept of the wireless Internet by bringing digital images into the wireless world. The first way LightSurf will do this is through hardware: Kahn says his goal is to integrate a digital camera into wireless phone handsets by the second half of next year.

Second, LightSurf is developing servers that can be used to redirect an image, reformat that image for viewing on different kinds of equipment and store the image in all its formats on a Web site. A user then could take the photo and either pick up a print at a local store or send the photo over the Internet to an e-mail address or a Web site to be stored.

Kahn's presence in the wireless application business could give wireless Internet the lift it so desperately is searching for, say some market watchers. "Many people look at Kahn as a wireless visionary, so the fact that he has embraced imaging makes it a compelling application for wireless Internet," says Lia Schubert, research analyst at InfoTrends Research Group.

Kahn also has his eye on including instant messaging services with photo imaging. Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo has been very successful in tying together digital images with instant communications. Kahn says LightSurf is working with AOL Time Warner on a similar service.

Still, even Kahn admits the challenges of supporting digital images over already-burdened wireless networks are many. "Once you start changing this into a mass phenomenon and start having millions of people using the system, there's all these digital images flying around," Kahn says. "It will cause much more stress and bandwidth usage than the cellular system has today."

Kahn believes that with LightSurf he can maneuver images through a bogged-down network, although he has been secretive about just how his technology will pull this off.

Securing partnerships with big players on both the photography and wireless sides, including Motorola and Eastman Kodak, could also help Kahn, says analyst Schubert. "It's not that millions will start sending photos on their phones in this country anytime soon," she says. "But by coming in early and forming partnerships, Kahn is setting the stage for future gains once the broader market starts adopting."

Copyright © 2004 Ziff Davis Media Inc. All Rights Reserved. Originally appearing in The Net Economy.