Pilgrim Beart

• 19 years experience in ground-breaking high-technology companies in Silicon Valley, Cambridge and Oxford.
• Experience building teams, creating and protecting IPR, raising capital and leading a wide range of disciplines.
• Founder of 3 start-ups.
• Born and educated in the UK with a BSc. in Computer Engineering.

Career

?	Founder Director (stealth-mode startup) 2006-
	VP Innovation then VP R&D Splashpower, Cambridge, UK 2002-2006 Splashpower created the vision of wireless power transfer to portable mobile devices, a vision now being publically espoused by companies around the world, including Motorola, DoCoMo, Visteon and more. Combining several challenging technologies which most engineers view as “black box” (electromagnetics, power electronics, control systems and thermal design), the resulting platform has been described by many as simply “magic!” Seed investor and helped create and protect the core technology, which was first in the world to demonstrate constant power transfer to a portable device regardless of its position or orientation.
	Founder Director antenova, Cambridge, UK 1999-2000 Fabless manufacturer of innovative mass market antenna technology. Used by Tier 1 mobile phone and laptop OEMs to provide WiFi, Bluetooth and 2G/3G connectivity. Led the protection and transfer of IPR from two Universities and recruited the initial executive team.
	Founder Director activeRF, Cambridge, UK (now Gatekeeper Systems) 1999-2001 An early implementer of real-time asset-location systems, using a variety of short-range RF technologies. As CEO, built the original 30-strong team and led the first two rounds of funding. See activeRF website from 2000 or 2003.
	Engineering Manager Chromatic Research, Sunnyvale, California (now ATI Research) 1995-1998 Chromatic designed the Mpact™ VLIW SIMD media-processor – an IC of similar scale and complexity to Intel’s Pentium. A world first in executing all PC media functions in software, including 2D & 3D graphics, videoconferencing, V34 modem, DVD decode and audio, and one of the first applications of Rambus. It required nearly 30 Windows drivers! Successfully shipped in major OEM PCs (Gateway, Compaq) and was first to demonstrate fully compliant DVD decoding on a PC. Managed the 15-people audio software group, developing algorithms and drivers, and spoke at conferences. Focussed on recruitment, technical leadership, project management and architectural design for next generation in a company which grew to 300 people.  In Redmond 1 day/week as Microsoft liaison.
	Senior Engineer  Atari, Sunnyvale, California 1994-1995 Creator of the world’s first 64-bit video games console, the Jaguar. In the Advanced Technology Group, designed parts of two 100k gate ASICs for the 64-bit Jaguar2 game-console using Verilog/Synopsys, including a Processor cache, Digital video encoder and CD-ROM interface. Also researched algorithmic texture generation and low-RAM architectures.
	Engineering Manager Euphonix, Palo Alto, California 1992-1994 Innovative manufacturer of Digitally-controlled Audio Mixing Consoles, which went public in 1995. Manager, Processing Systems and oversaw successful introduction of three major new product lines.
	Design Engineer Solid State Logic, Oxford, UK 1988-1992 World-leader in professional audio mixing consoles. Designed major parts of the ScreenSound Digital Audio Editor and Scenaria Digital Post-Production Mixer. Wrote software for kernel, system, applications and GUI. Designed hardware, including digital audio standards converter (polyphase FIR), MIDAS ASIC for digital audio routing and mixing, 40MHz 68030 CPU card, 40Mbyte/sec three-drive SCSI card.
	Design Engineer, Arcom Control Systems Ltd., Cambridge, UK 1984 Designs and manufactures computer boards for industrial and scientific control and monitoring. Before University, worked as Design Engineer and designed several of the world’s first STE bus control boards, which were distributed by major companies (RS, Farnell) and helped drive the company’s early growth.

Education

	The City University, London, UK 1985-1988 B.Sc. Degree (2:1 Hons.) in Computer Engineering. Won Course Prize and overall final year Project Prize for writing a hard real-time audio operating system using an early ARM-1 prototype. During vacations wrote three successful electronic music albums.
	Uppingham School, Rutland, UK

Fun

I live in Cambridge, UK and am married with two children. I enjoy inspiring people, helping new start-ups. Previously a director of the Full Moon entrepreneur's club and of the Cambridge Network. I’ve given various talks about start-up experiences. I’ve had many of my inventions granted as patents worldwide (list of patents). Myers-Briggs type: ENTP. Belbin type: Plant/Resource Investigator/Co-ordinator. I enjoy gentle relaxation such as sailing, skiing, tennis, understanding how things work and relaxing in good company with a good beer.

Some personal papers, studies and thoughts from over the years are collected below. Please click on the pictures/titles to explore deeper.

2005		Multinational CEMEX proposed building a huge new cement plant in rural Cambridgeshire, 5 miles upwind of Cambridge. I built a 3D model in Google Earth of the proposed plant, to show how it might look from local roads and villages. We used this to help raise local awareness. The project was postponed indefinitely.
2003		SeedCorp LLP – A group of us attempted to create a technology accelerator, bringing experienced entrepreneurs to help first-time entrepreneurs, and providing funding across the “gap” at $100k-$1m (too large for most Angels, too small for most VCs). It proved a hard model to operate, particularly since there is significant overhead in dealing with many small new entities. This gap is now starting to close, with more local high net-worth individuals re-investing their money and expertise locally, for example the Cambridge Angels group, and enterprises such as Angle Technology with novel funding strategies.
		Peer-to-peer Salary Survey – Now known as the Cambridge Network 4R’s survey, this is an automated process whereby companies contribute data on their salaries and other key costs, and in return receive automated results showing where their numbers lie on a histogram of all companies.
2002		Neuron – A simulator for pulse-based spatial logic, with many parallels to human neurones including coincidence-based behaviour.
1999	Real World Logic	Critical Mass, Social Systems and Real World Logic – A brief paper describing how the future will be shaped by wireless peer-to-peer machine communications embedded in our everyday lives.
		Xplique – converting a mobile phone into a location-aware audio guide.
	Social Systems	Social Systems – an application of peer-to-peer short-range radio networks, the space now addressed by Zigbee. In particular, peer-to-peer security systems where all units protect each other and there is no centralised controller to compromise.
1998		Tagsim – exploring ways to organise a short-range peer-to-peer RF network using virtual chemical gradients.
		Margonos – mapping images into audio files by encoding spatial frequency as audio frequencies. The image can be recovered by viewing the audio as a sonogram. For example, listen to the image on the left. A fun application of steganography.
		URLbuttons – detachable buttons that can be fitted to the keyboard of devices such as phones or computers, and converting the tedious process of typing a URL into a single button-press. Uses include company promotions or individual business-cards. The buttons are tiny RFID devices which are enabled when pressed.
1997		Mpact3D – an immersive virtual 3D environment, using 3D audio localisation, and including synthetic objects whose appearance can be altered interactively by external stimuli (for example, trumpets blaring in time with a music track).
		PilgyPost – Living in Silicon Valley, where almost everyone is an immigrant, I became acutely aware that in our world everyone used email as the primary communication means, but in the rest of the world (especially the older generation), postal mail was still the norm. PilgyPost was designed to bridge this gap, by making it absolutely trivial to send a postal mail … by sending an email.
1995		Voxbox – create a pop song with your voice! Voxbox listens to your singing and converts it into a score, which it then plays-back on built-in instruments. You can build-up an entire song, track by track, using nothing but your voice. Sing a lead tune and hear it back as lead-guitar. Hum to lay down a bass track. Make drum sounds with your mouth and Voxbox plays them back as real drums.
1994		Blox (aka Tabletop) – a design for an interactive SIMD machine for visually exploring massive parallelism. Each tile is covered with an array of LEDs, and contains its own processor. Programs are written from the perspective of each pixel. Multiple tiles can by physically connected, and communicate transparently, to create arrays of any size. Sensors such as light can cause effects such as ripples. Great for Life, Fractals, Video feedback and other fun stuff!
1991		ScreenSound multi-machine – ScreenSound was an early hard disk recorder, sitting alongside Quantel’s “Harry” digital video editor and controlled with a graphics pen. We used Ethernet in R&D to speed code downloads so I invented two features using this network: Swiping: Edit suites cluster the monitors for several ScreenSounds side-by-side. I enabled the user to just “swipe” the pen from one machine to another, e.g. swipe left and the cursor jumps to the screen to the left, now transparently remoting the UI over the network. Synchronising: Added the facility to “slave” multiple machines over the network, all locked to the master machine’s time-code.