Provided technical leadership and cross-team co-ordination for Palm's next generation operating system platform.

Actively involved in the evaluation and selection of major silicon components.

Provided technical leadership for new team implementing media support for Palm products.

Principally involved in the creation and deployment of technologies and intellectual property related to THX's primary areas of business. Provide technical direction and assistance to product development teams. Provide technical guidance to product management and business development activities.

The most significant poject is unfortunately still confidential. It involves creating a technology standard for the content creation and consumer electronics industries. It included hands-on development, such as writing reference code and implementing the technology on a Sigma Designs EM8620L DVD Player Reference Design. This project leverages THX's excellent relationships with both the major Hollywood studios, and major consumer electronics manufacturers.

Helped define the feature set, wrote microcontroller firmware and co-designed hardware for the 'Visual EQ' technology, announced by THX at the 2005 Consumer Electronics Show (please see http://www.thx.com/news/20050104A.html).

Consulted with two companies on consumer electronics product designs. For Sonos Inc., I provided consultation on product definition and technical specifications for their Digital Music System product range. For a second company, I consulted on product definition of a high-end remote control.

Immersive Inc. was a small company creating products for the high-end home theater and HTPC markets.

Being a small company, responsibilities were very broad; from evaluating technology partners, through hands-on product development, to answering dealer and customer questions.

Product development was based on embedded linux (kernel 2.4) running on a Toshiba MIPS-based platform. Media processing was handled by a combination of specialized video processing chips and FPGA/CPLDs. Developed a number of software components, including an on-screen GUI application, through middleware, to kernel drivers for the hardware.

Lead Architect for the group. Provided technical & architectural support to customers (particularly during product & roadmap definition), and technical leadership for the development team. This group offers engineering services to other groups within Philips. It offered all disciplines necessary to take a project from concept to transfer to volume manufacturing. Influenced and interacted with all disciplines involved in a new product's introduction.

Involved in the majority of projects while there, to varying extents. Provided leadership for two major projects in particular, concerning audio/video streaming over wireless networks (802.11a).

The first was 'Aviu', a portable LCD tablet designed to navigate, receive and play A/V streams over a wireless LAN. The tablet had a 10.4" TFT LCD, Geode (x86) processor for Windows CE and a media processor for decoding. The consumer-oriented user interface merged content metadata from local and remote network sources into a single unified view. Content was provided both by local network devices (such as the Transmitter described below, and PC-based media jukebox software) and our internet-based content directory, which was populated in real-time from multiple content partners. The project presented many challenges; technical, vendor management, content and software licensing amongst others.

The second project was a wireless MPEG-2 A/V stream transmitter. This set-top box encoded an analog video & audio signal or TV tuner channel into an MPEG-2 transport stream and sent it across the local network. An internal web server provided a means to control the internal TV tuner or external device (via IR blasting).

Active participant in strategy planning, interaction with other parts of Philips, and business acquisition for the group.

Technical Lead for the UK version of the company's primary product, launched by Sky Digital (major DBS provider in Europe) & Thomson Consumer Electronics (RCA & Proscan brands in the US).

Extensive work on external device infrared control issues, including complete rewrite of microcontroller code, adding decoding of several new IR protocols and providing a huge improvement in blasting accuracy.

Designed hardware/software solution for IR reception & transmission for 'Series 2' TiVos that eliminated a microcontroller. Worked closely with hardware engineer to incorporate the hardware portion in the TiVo ASIC, wrote linux device driver for software portion.

This IR architecture has been included in three subsequent generations of TiVo products (at last count), and has significantly reduced the level of support calls (previously #2 reason for calls).

Key contributor to the evolution of the device's famous 'peanut' remote control which ships with all TiVo products (except Sony-branded).

Provided technical leadership and architectural direction for Flashpoint's flagship product - Digita, an embedded operating system for digital imaging appliances. This product shipped on several popular digital cameras from Kodak and Minolta, and color inkjet printers from Epson (only available in the Pacific Rim). Strategic relationships with Hewlett-Packard and Pentax were announced at PMA 2000.

Introduced new system architecture and created design for a discovery service, message-passing system and reference-counted memory management suited to a complex, memory-constrained embedded environment.

Active participant in roadmap planning and scheduling. Evaluated technology presented by potential development partners. Frequently asked to contribute material for presentations to OEMs and strategic partners. Advisor to V.P. of Engineering and C.T.O. Two patents filed.

'Father' of the Philips Pronto, a remote control based on a touchscreen bitmapped LCD. It was launched to rave reviews and demand outstripped supply for months. It has defined a new market segment for remote controls, which it still dominates even today. The original product has evolved into a profitable product range, following the original formula, and is also OEMed to a number of major CE manufacturers (Marantz, Yamaha, Onkyo, CAL, etc). It is still widely regarded as the benchmark for the category.

Wrote & pitched the product proposal, and worked closely with the development team to refine the feature set, user interface, and Windows-based setup/editor application (ProntoEdit). Supported the Pronto online community through its formative period.

Software Architect & team lead for the DVX-8000, a first-of-a-kind convergence product aimed at the home theater market. It integrated a PC, Surround-sound preamp, DVD player, TV tuner and line-doubling technology into a single unit with the appearance and user experience of a consumer electronics product. The closest equivalent today would be to combine a Windows Media Center PC with a 'home theater in a box' product.

This was a 'technology statement' product for Philips, and received considerable positive coverage in the specialty home theater press, including being featured on the cover of several magazines. Development schedules were extremely compressed, going from concept to retail availability in nine months.

Oversaw software architecture and development, provided extensive input to hardware architecture & design. Designed APIs and inter-processor communications protocols. Implemented DLL and driver APIs (plug & play static VxD, with sysperf support) to communicate with embedded controller. Some work on firmware of embedded controller. Reworked video port manager (VPM) layer. Reverse-engineered remote control's IR 'clone' protocol to allow creation of PC-based setup/editor app. Wrote sections of the user manual. Designed several video test patterns as part of the setup application. Wrote Photoshop plugin for manipulating areas of the color key value (used by graphic artists creating user interface). Helped create graphic artwork for user interface.

Lead Architect on a project Philips undertook with Microsoft to define a new consumer electronics platform. This appears to have resurfaced years later (and much evolved) as Microsoft's 'Media Center' platform. Oversaw every aspect of the design of a complex PC-class development platform, including mechanical and industrial design, user interaction, hardware and software architecture, chip architecture selection and hardware design. Sadly Philips eventually determined that it was not in their long-term strategic interest and withdrew their participation.

Lead Architect for SmartTalk, an architecture, platform and protocol for interoperability and integration of intelligent consumer electronics devices. Sony was approached with the result, and later the other major consumer electronics manufacturers also joined the effort. This work was the basis of the HAVi and HomeAPI standards promoted across the CE industry, and also appears to have influenced the design of UPnP and JINI.

Helped identify possible means of cost-reducing the WebTV reference design.

Assisted in a large number of due-diligence, feasibility and proof-of-concept efforts, both internal and external.

Eight patents filed, seven granted to date (US patents #5819294, #5959536, #6067478, #6212238, #6437828, #6480473, #6580461).

Key engineer in the design and implementation of a sophisticated electronic publishing system for eWorld (Apple's online service), based on a distributed object store. Patent granted (US Patent #5625818)

Developed a number of extensions to the functionality of eWorld's client software, including an easy-to-use Interactive Calendar and Event Navigation tool. This provided automatic compensation for time zone differences around the world, international date & time formats, and descriptions with styled text. This increased usage of the Events Calendar by an order of magnitude, and resulted in a substantial increase in event attendance.

Ported a popular object-oriented MUD server (LambdaMOO from Xerox PARC) from UNIX to MacOS, and interfaced it via an X.25 gateway to the eWorld online service. Collaborated with another engineer to create a client extension to provide a semi-graphical user interface.

Various investigations and proof-of-concept work applying (then fledgling) internet protocols and technologies to providing an online service (i.e. a combination portal and ISP service). Some work with HTTP servers and CGIs (in C). Prototypes were demonstrated to Apple's board.

Selected as technical contact to evaluate technologies offered by external vendors.

Key engineer on distributed virtual AppleShare file server. Product displaced the market leader in a matter of months and the company was acquired by Novell soon after. Elements of the technology found their way into versions of NetWare.

Developed a mechanism to run an faceless application as a 'daemon' under the single-tasking MacOS 6 (both Finder and MultiFinder).

Developed a mechanism to transparently augment the Finder's user interface at runtime with additional elements to support extra attributes of the 'virtual' file server

Developed a mechanism to make the non-reentrant Macintosh file system re-entrant. The file system would have deadlocked without it, and the product would not have been possible.

Developed mechanism to simulate a 'virtual' network node, allowing network traffic to be identified and intercepted before reaching the network. This provided large performance improvements (factors of 3-5) and reduced code complexity.

Ported SoftPC from Sun 3 to the Macintosh (the first non-UNIX port). This was a major challenge, due to the absence of several fundamental UNIX services on the Macintosh (like virtual memory) and a relative shortage of machine resources. Within six months the product contributed over 50% of the company's revenues and provided the lion's share for a number of years.

Developed a new processor emulation (of the Intel iAPX 286) with a reduced memory footprint and host processor requirements, resulting in successful products for the Macintosh Portable and other popular low-end Macintoshes. This emulator was also used as the foundation for the NeXT and later Macintosh versions of SoftPC.

Designed and implemented a set of MS-Windows device drivers which used an emulation 'back door' to let Windows drive the host display system as an intelligent accelerated graphics card. This prototype eventually resulted in 'SoftWindows', a product Apple chose to bundle with several Power Macintosh models at launch.

Highlights of Other Work Experience

• Provided developer-level technical consultation to members of Apple UK's third-party developer program
• Implemented sections of a custom communications application being developed for British Airways
• Worked on portions of a router product being developed by SRL

• Developed firmware for intelligent LAN cards (media access control and name service) and communications servers (LAN to X.25/X.3 and SNA)
• Developed various layers of protocol stacks (for two proprietary LANs)
• Wrote a debugger/monitor that proved popular with co-workers (embedded and TSR versions)

• Developed firmware for a desktop machine (not IBM PC compatible), including a re-entrant I/O system based on interrupt and DMA services
• Developed firmware to emulate IBM PC hardware by interpreting captured bus cycles
• Implemented ROM BIOS firmware
• Ported operating systems, wrote graphics and networking drivers

• Developed firmware for Z-80 and 8086 S-100 systems
• Ported operating systems, wrote graphics and networking drivers
• Co-designed S-100 hi-res graphics card
• Supported developers at VARs and major accounts
• Wrote developer and end-user documentation
• Provided telephone support for end users

Personal Interests

• Home Theater, A/V and consumer electronics in general (perhaps more of a consuming passion than an interest...)
• Home Theater PCs (HTPCs)
• Software (& some minor hardware) development
• Woodworking (or is it collecting power tools? :-)
• Various sysadmin/network stuff (My web sites, home & colo servers, firewalls/IDS/security, wired & wireless networking, linux development, etc.)
• Photography (digital)
• Remote controls (of all things... :-) and Home Automation
• Telephony & VoIP (tinker with asterisk at home)