The smartphones of the year, the iPhone 6 and the Galaxy S6, have the best cameras ever seen on mobile phones. After devouring the point-and-shoot camera market with such phones, the mobile phone industry is ready to take the next big step in photography. A number of startups are working on projects to make our phone cameras super powerful. LinX, recently acquired by Apple, is one such company. And Light is another.
The man leading the camera revolution at Light is Rajiv Laroia, the Chief Technology Officer and the co-founder at the camera startup. Laroia has a B.Tech in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, and a Ph.D in the same discipline from the University of Maryland College Park. He is credited with doubling the speed of data transmission over voiceband telephone channels, making the super-fast download speeds that we have today.
Right after his Ph.D, Laroia joined Bell Labs and worked at it’s Mathematical Sciences Research Centre, eventually becoming the head of the Digital Communications Research Department. Using the wireless technologies that he has developed there, he co-founded Flarion Technologies, which was later brought by chip making giant Qualcomm. At Qualcomm, he worked as Senior Vice President and helped the company develop the 4G LTE technology. Every time we use our broadband modems or 4G LTE on our phones, we are using technologies developed by Laroia, and soon our phone cameras will join that list.