Meet The Geniuses Making Your Cell Phone Internet 1,000x Faster Than 4G
Despite decades of advancements, we still lose signal when walking around in a big city like New York or San Francisco.
Or when attending a popular sporting event - individual towers just can't handle thousands of people trying to move data at once.
But a hot startup with some major engineering talent is hoping to change all of that.
Founded in 2011, Artemis is a startup working on pCell, a new wireless standard that it thinks could leapfrog 4G altogether. With decades of experience and hundreds of patents between them, these are the guys at Artemis who are making their amazing technology possible.
He's been involved with cutting-edge research in the tech industry for more than 30 years. After graduating from Columbia University in 1983, he began work on massively-parallel graphics chips at Atari, decades before they became mainstream.
Two years later, he was working on the technology that would become QuickTime as Apple's Principal Scientist.
A serial entrepreneur and Ayn Rand fan, Perlman founded Rearden as a business incubator in 2000.
Since then, he's launched a number startups from within Rearden, several of which have been spun-off. MOVA, his motion capture technology studio in the San Francisco Bay Area, was notably used for Brad's Pitt's facial capture for the 2008 film "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."
Perlman's last project before Artemis was OnLive, which hoped to serve as a "Netflix for video games" by letting gamers stream high-end games to any device, like interactive YouTube videos. After a rough period of layoffs in 2012, OnLive is still kicking but has lost a lot of its hype.
Perlman holds over 135 US patents that run the gamut of communications, video, graphics, facial capture, video gaming, software lens, and wireless power technologies.
Antonio Forenza is a co-founder and Principal Scientist at Artemis.
He's been working with Steve Perlman for nearly a decade, having begun his research at Rearden in 2005.
Before that, he worked on systems engineering teams at seeral major wireless companies, including Samsung and Freescale Semiconductor.
Forenza holds a PhD from the University of Texas at Austin and is named on 13 wireless patents.
Even more impressively, he's made several significant contributions to the Wi-fi and LTE standards that the wireless chips in all of our mobile devices are built to follow.
Roger van der Laan is a co-founder and VP of Engineering at Artemis.
Like Forenza, he joined Perlman at Rearden almost a decade ago and has been involved with all of the incubator's major technology innovations.
He's a co-inventor of the previously-mentioned motion caption technology that made CGI Brad Pitt look so good, as well as the core technology that let OnLive stream HD-quality games across the Web without introducing too much lag.
If you've ever used an in-flight entertainment system, you've got van der Laan to thank for that too: as Director of Research and Development at Delta, he designed and built the first such system that could let each passenger play their own TV shows and movies on demand during a flight.
Like his Artemis colleagues, van der Laan holds a number of patents: his current count is about 20, through he has approximately 40 pending.