Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on Apple Rumors and Four-Corner Market Opportunities (Part 1)

The Guest

Karl Guttag, is an industry analyst, speaker and the author of KGOnTech, a technology blog at kguttag.com.

Karl has 40 years of experience in Graphics and Image Processors, Digital Signal Processing, and memory architecture, as well as micro displays, for use in Heads Up Displays and AR glasses.

He’s received 150 patents related to these technologies and many billions of dollars of revenue attributed to those inventions. Karl spent nearly 20 years at Texas Instruments, and was named a TI Fellow—the youngest in the company’s history. In the 25 years since, he’s been a CTO at three micro display system startups, in two of which he was also a co-founder.

He was also recently the Chief Science Officer at Ravn, a company developing a hardware and software platform to deliver mission-critical intelligence to military and first responders.

Karl Guttag

LinkedIn
KGOnTech

The Conversation

Like my previous interviews with Karl, this was a long and wide ranging conversation that I split into multiple parts. In this first part, we touch on:

  • rise and fall of high-end digital photography, 

  • silicon-based camera sensors, 

  • challenges of unique manufacturing processes have with volume and price, 

  • the downsides of the smartphone supply chain, 

  • rumors about Apple's efforts in VR and AR, 

  • the size of the VR market, 

  • the military and enterprise opportunity for AR, 

  • "four-corner markets" and how they apply to VR & AR, and

  • the benefits and risks of video-passthrough VR.

Part 2 will continue with a deeper dive into µLED display and popular optics technologies.

Jason McDowallhardware, AR smartglasses, optics, VR, enterprise, consumer, micro displays