The Silicon Eye: How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete
By George Gilder

"Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder ( Telecosm ; Microcosm ) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. "Computers can perform instantaneous calculus... and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database," he writes. "But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together." The book traces a circuitous path in its investigation of Foveon's "silicon eye"-leading through discussions of the magnetic codes on paper checks and of notebook computer touchpads-but Gilder is a competent, eloquent guide. Moreover, the journey is populated with richly limned characters like Dick Merrill, who, with "wire-rim glasses, long white coat, electromagnetic blond hair, a bright feral glint in his skyblue eyes," resembles Doc Brown from the Back to the Future films, and Michelle Mahowald, who decorates her lab walls with "artsy-dispsy posters" and releases "random analog beasts of prey from their safe digital cages." While some readers will find Foveon's saga half-fulfilled, Gilder sees its fulfillment as inevitable. "Foveon," he writes, "can do for the camera what Intel did for the computer: Reduce it to a chip and make it ubiquitous." Whether or not readers are believers by the end of this narrative, the ride is electric." -- Publishers Weekly

About the Book:
A best-selling author goes behind the scenes at a cutting-edge technology company poised to change the way computers see. Thanks to the digital technology revolution, cameras are everywhere-PDAs, phones, anywhere you can put an imaging chip and a lens. Battling to usurp this two-billion-dollar market is a Silicon Valley company, Foveon, whose technology not only produces a superior image but also may become the eye in artificially intelligent machines. Behind Foveon are two legendary figures who made the personal computer possible: Carver Mead of Caltech, one of the founding fathers of information technology, and Federico Faggin, inventor of the CPU-the chip that runs every computer.

George Gilder has covered the wizards of high tech for twenty-five years and has an insider's knowledge of Silicon Valley and the unpredictable mix of genius, drive, and luck that can turn a startup into a Fortune 500 company. The Silicon Eye is a rollicking narrative of some of the smartest-and most colorful-people on earth and their race to transform an entire industry. 12 illustrations.

"A compelling narrative that reads like a brilliant detective story with deep insights into the concept of designing our technology." -- Ray Kurzweil, artificial-intelligence innovator and author of The Age of Intelligent Machines



Telecosm: The World After Bandwidth Abundance
By George Gilder

The supreme abundance of the telecosm is the electromagnetic spectrum, embracing all the universe of vibrating electrical and magnetic fields, from power line pulses through light beams to cosmic rays. The scarcity that unlocks this abundance is the supreme scarcity in physical science: the absolute minimum time it takes to form an electromagnetic wave of a particular length. Set by the permeability of free space, this minimal span determines the speed of light.



The Meaning of the Microcosm
By George Gilder

"In The Meaning of the Microcosm, George Gilder introduces us to some of the inventors and their innovations that are building America's future in the Digital Age. Gilder brings to life in an easy to understand way often complex technologies. He explains what is driving the fundamental change in the way we live and the way we work."
--Steve Forbes



Life After Television
By George Gilder

Television has long been identified as a dead hand on culture; but as George Gilder so brilliantly reveals here, this centralized, authoritarian institution is also a dying technology whose grip on our imaginative and economic life threatens to impede America's competitiveness in the next century. Gilder's optimistic message is that the U.S. has only to unleash its industrial resources to command the "telefuture," in which new technology will overthrow the stultifying influence of mass media, renew the power of individuals, and promote democracy throughout the world.
First published in 1990 by Whittle Books. Currently published by W.W. Norton & Co.



Microcosm
By George Gilder

Taking the reader inside the tiniest computer chips as well as the greatest minds of Silicon Valley, George Gilder explores the unrecognized technological and entrepreneurial revolution we are now experiencing, one which is creating unprecedented opportunities for business and technology. Microcosm contains vivid accounts of the latest inventions and revealing portraits of the leading scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs at the frontiers of knowledge.