There were some eye-catching participants at ‘CES 2024’, the world’s largest consumer electronics and information technology (IT) exhibition, which ended in Las Vegas, USA on the 12th. The main characters are Keith Lynx, co-developer of Wi-Fi, and Karlheinz Brandenburg, co-developer of MP3. These people are all known as ‘pioneers’ in academia.
Keith Lynx, known as the ‘father of Wi-Fi’, is the CEO of a broadband laser technology company called ‘Superlight Photonics’ and visited CES ‘Eureka Park’, an exhibition space for startups.
While working as a researcher at Bell Laboratories in the United States in 1990, he invented wireless Internet and led the process of standardizing it as Wi-Fi. There is a famous anecdote in which the late Apple founder Steve Jobs called him in 1998 and asked for an explanation of wireless Internet. Afterwards, Apple added a wireless Internet function to the iBook, and later other companies such as IBM and Dell also added this function, opening the way for a huge technological revolution. He also worked at fabless company Green Peak Technology and semiconductor and technology company Qorvo, and went back and forth between academia and industry before joining Superlight Photonics last year. The company has developed a portable device that can use supersonic lasers anytime, anywhere. Lynx recognized the potential of this technology and began accompanying his future engineers.
German electrical engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg, the ‘father of MP3’, created MP3, an audio compression technology, in 1989 while he was working at the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany. MP3 technology shook the industry in the late 1990s, leading to the emergence of MP3 players. Apple’s iPod, which was an unprecedented hit, became the starting point of the smartphone revolution.
Brandenburg founded Brandenburg Lab, a spin-off company of Germany’s Ilmenau University of Technology and the Fraunhofer Institute for Digital Media Technology, and introduced immersive audio technology. It provides an auditory experience similar to what you hear in real life in environments such as games and extended reality (XR).
The reason why the two people’s active activities attract attention is because they are not limited to their role as researchers but are making efforts to pass on their business experience to future generations. There are countless cases of Korean startups failing to overcome the threshold of commercialization even though they possess excellent technologies. We need the wisdom of experienced ‘adults’ in the Korean technology industry. Samsung, Korea’s leading technology company, has been selecting ‘Samsung Masters’ since 2019. We look forward to seeing them actively working in various areas of the technology ecosystem even after retirement.
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