NDAs and a loose-lipped Microsoft Engineer.

... AKA Snowboard sent this to me the other day after a phone conversation.


We are up against strict NDA's -- the company simply can't talk about what they're doing right now.


So I'm waiting. This is interesting.


Thanks!




"It's kind of amazing that one loose-lipped (Microsoft) engineer opened his mouth too many times pushing Jobs to license their software. The guy's conceit drove Apple's CEO mad enough to set him on a course that would go on to sink Microsoft's hope for a winning mobile platform for more than a decade."

Patently Apple



To learn a little more behind the scenes about how the iPad came to be, you could check out Walter Isaacson's biography titled 'Steve Jobs' at a library if you don't own it. I'll recount just one tiny fragment from the book about the birth of the decision to create the iPad. On Page 467 the book recounts:
"One of the engineers developing a tablet PC at Microsoft was married to a friend of Laurene [the wife of Steve Jobs] and Steve Jobs, and for his fiftieth birthday he wanted to have a dinner party that included them along with Bill and Melinda Gates. Jobs went,  a bit reluctantly. 'Steve was actually quite friendly to me at the dinner,' Gates recalls, but he 'wasn't particularly friendly' to the birthday guy.
Gates was annoyed that the guy kept revealing information about the tablet PC he had developed at Microsoft. 'He's our employee and he's revealing our intellectual property,' Gates recounted. Jobs was also annoyed, and it had just the consequence that Gates feared.
As Jobs recalled: 'The guy badgered me about how Microsoft was to to completely change the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate all notebook computers, and Apple out to license his Microsoft software. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus. As soon as you have a stylus, your dead. This dinner was like the tenth time he talked to me about it and I was so sick of it that I came home and said, 'Fuck this, let's show him what a tablet can really be.'

LiDAR Partners Program

From reddit


OnSemiconductor

The LiDAR Partners Program is an ecosystem consisting of module manufacturers, module customization partners, and component suppliers. It offers opportunities for LiDAR module manufacturers to benefit from our expertise, reference designs, and component partner ecosystem when designing LiDAR solutions. This program also allows OEMs to be better connected to these module suppliers by leveraging our worldwide sales force to promote the publicly available partner solutions more widely to the industry. If an OEM has specific design requirements, the ability to connect with a customization partner specialized in manufacturing based on reference designs makes turning custom specifications into a product easier for OEMs that do not want to design or manufacture their own LiDAR sensor.

Over the past month, we announced collaborations with a number of LiDAR module manufacturers using ON Semiconductor SiPMs in their sensors. We are pleased to introduce this first wave of partners, listed below, in the LiDAR Partners Program, and look forward to announcing many more in the coming months.

• MicroVision
• RoboSense
• Blickfeld
• SOS Lab

Find out more about our LiDAR Ecosystem Partners and their products today! For live demos of our LiDAR technology, visit us on February 4-6^th at the SPIE Photonics West Exhibition in San Francisco, California.