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- THE FRIDAY LETTER -

(emailed weekly, from Gilder Publishing,
for friends and subscribers)

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| http://www.gilder.com/ | Issue 291.0/April 20, 2007

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HEADLINES:

- The Week / Gilder: The Wireless Wars
- Friday Feature / Microvision’s Pocket Projector
- Friday Blogger Bonus / Nobody Ignores Carver Mead
- Readings /

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The Week / The Wireless Wars

George Gilder, The Wall Street Journal (4/13/07): The 10-year war mounted by EU bureaucrats and Europe's communications giants against America's leading wireless technology innovator, QUALCOMM, is now reaching a climax. On Monday, Nokia refused to renew licenses on next generation technology following EU ally Broadcom's suit at the International Trade Commission to bar import of cellphones containing QUALCOMM chips from factories in Taiwan.

A decade ago, with its single, unifying cellphone standard known as GSM, Europe led the world in mobile communications. But threatened by QUALCOMM 's CDMA breakthrough, the Europeans launched a ferocious political and PR offensive, hoping to scare off potential customers of the young American firm. The technology was all hype, they said; it "violated the laws of physics."

When QUALCOMM proved them wrong and its mobile technology deployed across the U.S. and Korea, Europe went to plan B. They excluded the Americans from the standards process for third-generation, or 3G, technology, battled in the courts, and mandated their "new" system for all of Europe. But in fact, the new European and Japanese standard, called Wideband CDMA, was essentially a copy of the American CDMA system.

With the new mobile system flourishing -- accommodating many times more voice callers and beating the previous generation in security, dropped calls and data -- everyone finally admitted that the American company had a lock on the fundamental technologies. The Europeans and Japanese licensed the American technology, CDMA and its sibling WCDMA, assuring that it would be the future of wireless mobile communications, an industry now selling a billion handsets a year.

Today, however, with those 3G licenses coming up for renewal and a fourth generation of wireless in sight, Europe is once again pushing the political levers to control the future -- this time with the unwitting assistance of the U.S. government. Although their immediate target is U.S. dominance in cellphone technology, a collateral victim would be the U.S. broadband economy.

Until recently, the obscure International Trade Commission played a minor role in the enforcement of patents. But with a Supreme Court ruling in 2006 making it more difficult for patent holders to win federal court injunctions against violators, complainants can now turn to the ITC. Unfortunately, complainants can also use an intellectual-property dispute as a cover for enmeshing competitors in the protectionist mazes of international trade law.

And that is what's happened to QUALCOMM, the titan of U.S. intellectual property in wireless, with close to 5,700 patents on the next generation of cellphones and wireless data systems around the globe. Attempting to upend the San Diego titan's well-earned dominance are Broadcom and its European "Gang of Six" sponsors.

At a recent ITC public hearing, Broadcom CEO Scott MacGregor declared that the U.S. wireless telecom system would function better if it completely capitulated to the European standard. The Broadcom campaign began in May 2001 when it purchased, from an obscure bar-code and RFID company called Intermec, a set of three flimsy patents that they are now attempting to use to block the importation of all Qualcomm wireless data chips incorporating its (Qualcomm's) state-of-the-art data system called EV-DO….

Read George’s complete commentary:
http://www.discovery.org/scripts/viewDB/index.php?command=view&id=3993&program=DI%20Main%20Page%20-%20Article&callingPage=discoMainPage

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ANNOUNCEMENT: George Gilder featured in the upcoming film "The Call of the Entrepreneur" premiering in Washington, DC on May 10th.

View the trailer: http://www.calloftheentrepreneur.com/trailer/
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Friday Feature / Microvision’s Pocket Projector

Gilder Technology Analyst Charlie Burger, Gilder Technology Report, April 2007: Would you pay an extra hundred dollars for a cell phone with an embedded projector? Alexander Tokman is betting that about 3%–5% percent of those who purchase “feature rich” phones will jump at the chance, meaning unit sales of mobile phones containing his PicoP microprojector could reach 24m–40m annually based on last year’s figures. The feisty CEO of Microvision also hopes to see PicoP in other handset devices such MP3 and DVD players and to sell it as a standalone accessory the size of an iPod. Imagine carrying in your pocket a projector that can expand your cell phone’s 2” screen into a 30” or 100” screen of bright, crisp images (even when projected onto distorted surfaces) to watch mobile television and video or to browse the internet.

Tokman imagines millions of consumers doing just that before the end of next year. But first he has to overcome the manufacturing hurdles still blocking his tiny display engine. (We described these in detail in the January Gilder Technology Report along with Microvision’s world-beating display technology.) Tokman exudes Lombardi-like confidence that he’s about to execute a game-winning touchdown. His offense includes the likes of Corning, Novalux, and Osram working feverishly on green lasers specifically for PicoP, two major high-volume manufacturing partners gearing up for the big ramp, and 75 in-house engineers (over half of his total staff).

During the consumer electronics show in January, Tokman met privately with 31 manufacturers and expects to reach development agreements with several this year. These same manufacturers tell Tokman that he has virtually no competition based on size, cost, power, and image brightness and contrast. As the PicoP ascends rapidly into handsets throughout 2009, Tokman expects his technology to begin appearing in luxury cars as reprogrammable, instrument-cluster displays. The added benefit for manufacturers of automobile modules is elimination of the expensive manual process required to install the inferior display systems offered by his competitors ….

Is Microvision a buy? Read Charlie’s complete Microvision (MVIS) analysis. Log on now with your GTR subscriber ID at http://www.gildertech.com.

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Friday Blogger Bonus / Nobody Ignores Carver Mead

Blogger (04/17/07): "It's easy to have a complicated idea," Carver Mead used to tell his students at Caltech. "It's very, very hard to have a simple idea."

The genius of Carver Mead is that over the past 40 years, he has had many simple ideas. More than 50 of them have been granted patents, and many involved him in the start-up of at least 20 companies, including Intel. Without the special transistors he invented, cell phones, fiber-optic networks, and satellite communications would not be ubiquitous. Last year, high-tech high priest George Gilder called him "the most important practical scientist of the late 20th century."

"Nobody," Bill Gates once said, "ignores Carver Mead."

X3 is the latest and most innovative product from Foveon Inc., the Silicon Valley digital-imaging company that Mead, 68, founded in 1997. Named for the fovea centralis—the part of the human retina where vision is sharpest and most color perception is located Foveon took as its mission another radically simple idea Mead loves: "Use all the light."

Check out the Feng-Gui blog:
http://feng-gui.blogspot.com/2007/04/foveon-x3-technology.html

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