At the 6Sight Imaging conference in Monterey today, French legend Philippe Kahn unveiled his latest start-up after three years in stealth mode. Fullpower created a software that turns raw information gathered from sensors such as motion, imaging, proximity, ambient light, pressure, compass, GPS, etc... into actionable information instantaneously.
Currently the Wii and the iPhone are the most famous consumer electronic devices that make use of such motion sensors based on Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) technology.

"But the Wii and iPhone are just the beginning. Sensors will soon enable all kinds of functions, such as shaking your cell phone to pick up a call. No buttons, no fingers, just simple, natural gestures", said Philippe Kahn.

Kahn (pictured) seemed totally obsessed by what could happen in year 2010. Maybe because that's when Fullpower gets acquired, a similar pattern to his previous 2 companies that were sold about 7 yrs after their inception. The Frenchman indeed predicted that there will be 10 billion MEMS chips in mobile phones by 2010 and 2 billion new camera phones in year 2010 alone! All these will definitely require a piece of software to manage all that "raw" data! Here in more details what Fullpower' system does:

The Fullpower multitasking real-time operating environment is a compact AI-system that uses a combination of rule based, neural network, and mathematical modeling algorithms. It's been designed to minimize integration efforts for the manufacturer of small devices like camera-phones, pacemakers, insulin pumps or media players and is available for Linux, BREW, Symbian, and Windows camera phones as well as other native environments.

Kahn is definitely onto something and again might have out speed any of its competitors again. French market research firm Yole Développement expects the global MEMS market to grow to $20 billion by 2016, from about $7 billion in 2006. This year, Yole expects about 400 million MEMS chip units to be shipped, or about 5 percent of the total foundry market.

Predicting the iPhone nano
Kahn was also totally gaga about the iPhone and even predicted the coming launch of a smaller version of the iPhone, that he called the "nano". The Fullpower CEO also said his company was working with most of the CE manufacturing using sensor which I assumes include also Apple!

The brick/iPhone vs the fashion model/Razr: software vs hardware innovation!
During his 6Sight keynote liken the iPhone to the "brick" and the Motorola Razr to a "fashion model".

"The Razr is very thin, anorexic and fits in your shirt pocket. But it is not great from a camera phone stand point, because by shrinking it and making everything smaller, you can do less and less things with it. But it is a really cool device... [until the "brick" arrived!] The brick is an iPhone. The iPhone is big, its heavy, doesn't really have a great battery life. It doesn't fit into your shirt pocket. [...] The fashion model is an example of mechanical innovation, the brick is an example of software innovation. The Razr is a very complicated piece of hardware. It takes very special factories to make it, you have to etch these things, they have moving parts, it is extremely small with lots of complex stuff. The iPhone is a big piece of hardware with one big button, that is about it. And then, it is all software. But, it has the whole camera phone industry scrambling!"

Finally, I tought I'll include a short video that I made at the conference on Kahn's highly positive view of the current iPhone :-)