Comdex

While Fanboys Breathlessly Await Steve Jobs's Apple iTab, They Should Probably Thank Bill Gates Too

Kara Swisher in News on October 5, 2009 at 8:10 am PT

Way back in the fall of 2001, BoomTown attended a keynote speech at the now-defunct Comdex show in Las Vegas, where Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates continued to bang the drum for one of his long-running obsessions: The tablet computer. It is an obsession he has never given up. So it is ironic that all the hype has suddenly and firmly coalesced around the particulars of the tablet that Apple has developed–a device being spearheaded by CEO Steve Jobs and likely to arrive in the coming months.

D7 Tech Demo: Fullpower

John Paczkowski in D7 on May 27, 2009 at 9:05 am PT

Philippe Kahn’s history of entrepreneurship is nearly as old as the PC itself. He developed software for the Micral N, one of the earliest commercial personal computers, back in 1973. As CEO of Borland Software, he touted himself the “barbarian” of the software industry and embraced that identity by holding one of the first press conferences for his company in a McDonald’s in Las Vegas during Comdex. Ousted from Borland in 1995, Kahn went on to found wireless synchronization outfit Starfish Software, which he sold to Motorola. He followed that up with LightSurf Technologies, a picture-messaging company acquired by Verisign in 2005. Today Philippe Kahn is at D7 as CEO of Fullpower, a company developing accelerometer-based hardware and software.