Mr. Al Alcorn This is Me

Education

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1. 1. www.gamasutra.com

   www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news - [Cached]

   Published on: 2/17/2008   Last Visited: 2/17/2008

   Speaker: Allan Alcorn (CTO, IMMI), Ralph H. Baer

2. 2. www.technologyreview.com

   www.technologyreview.com/print - [Cached]

   Published on: 9/5/2007   Last Visited: 9/16/2007

   IMMI CTO Al Alcorn says that using cell phones was an important part of the design.
   ...
   Acoustic-matching software on the cell phone analyzes the sound waves and creates a "fingerprint" of the sound, Alcorn says.This process reduces a 150-kilobyte sound file to a 1.5-kilobyte fingerprint.Thanks to Moore's Law, he says, modern cell phones are capable of doing the processing unaided.Every 10 or 15 minutes, the phone sends the fingerprints to IMMI's servers in San Jose, where they are compared with known fingerprints of television shows, music, and advertisements.Because the hashed files are so small, Alcorn says, they're easily stored on the phone, so if the volunteer loses cell-phone service temporarily, the files can be sent once service is restored.
   
   Volunteers also plug a Bluetooth beacon into a home outlet.The beacon communicates with the phone to track whether the user is inside or outside the home.Alcorn says the beacons can also be placed in clients' stores to track volunteers who come in. Although he would like to use GPS, Alcorn says that it's currently cost prohibitive to buy this information from the cell-phone companies, which control it.
   ...
   Alcorn says it would be possible to run sound from a device such as an iPod through the phone, but this isn't something currently being done.

3. 3. www.metrosplash.com

   www.metrosplash.com/bio/aalcor - [Cached]

   Published on: 6/2/2008   Last Visited: 6/2/2008

   Al Alcorn
   ...
   Al Alcorn
   
   President and Chief Executive Officer
   
   A pioneering engineer and computer scientist, Al Alcorn was the original designer of Pong, the videogame that put Atari on the map in the 1970's.After leaving Atari in 1980, Mr. Alcorn was involved in a number of startups, including Cumma, a reprogrammable video game cartridge/kiosk system.He was also an advisor to Etak, one of the first practical, in-car navigation systems.In 1998, he founded Zowie Intertainment.Mr. Alcorn is an Apple Fellow and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 with a B.S. degree in EECS.