No matter what you think of One Laptop Per Child's recent actions, you have to admire their game-changing effect on the technology industry. What once was a dream - low-cost laptops for education - is now a multi-million dollar market being fought over by a growing number of 4P computing options.
Want to work with Mary Lou Jepsen?
The most recent milestone of this market comes from Pixel Qi, the company Mary Lou Jepsen founded to take her own game-changing screen designs beyond the XO laptop. After six months of development, she's ready to hire.
If you are a liquid crystal display designer, obsessed with optics, and/or challenge Stephan Hawkins in physics, and can do all that in Mandarin Chinese too, then check out the Pixel Qi job descriptions.
It may go against the feelings of a few others, but I'm really excited by the Director of Licensing position. I see technology licensing as one of the fastest way to both impact an industry and lower costs for everyone.
May all of us soon have our own dual mode display.
I thing Jhonny Lee is the perfect candidate for this position.
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~johnny/academic/
Good to see that Pixel Qi is moving ahead.
Mary Lou has some pretty radical ideas. From the mission statement http://www.pixelqi.com/mission:
"We contend that new displays, with integrated touchscreens, and wireless capability are the future. They are essentially motherboad-less and don't need much an operating system at all. We are currently in a world of $10 CPUs, next year they will be less expensive. We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself. This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA."
That's pretty far out.
Also,I wonder what the regional sales director they want to hire is going to do, since it seems it is going to be a couple of years before they have something to sell. Does it take this long to set up a sales network?
I hope Pixel Qi gets into real manufacturing and real product sales. In my experience as an investor, companies that rely on licensing of intellectual property do poorly, financially. They spend too much time and money in legal maneuvres, court battles, negotiations, etc. Lawyers are not what you want to invest in. You want to invest in factories that churn out product that people want to buy.
Thomas
I cannot provide more than an anecdote on the performance of companies that rely on licensing. I have no idea how much hardware Dolby Laboratories has produced in the past 10-20 years, but I've never seen a Dolby-manufactured product in the stores. I still see their logo on most of home theatre systems from Sony, Pioneer, etc, and after the trailers at every movie I attend and almost every DVD I watch. Dolby seems to be doing just fine on licensing intellectual property.
"Dolby seems to be doing just fine on licensing intellectual property."
Doesn't Dolby develop sound processing applications?
Like, Dolby Surround is not only a bunch of patents, but also a way of making it really happen.
But this is the same discussion as with being a prof sportsman/woman: The lone athletes that make millions are on top of millions of athletes that make a lone buck.
You can get rich with IP licensing, but only if you control something people really, really need and can kill the competition in court.
Winter