Charlie Oppenheimer is president and CEO of Digital Fountain (www.digitalfountain.com), a small, privately-held company based in Freemont, CA. The firm's innovative DF Raptor^TM forward-error-correction (FEC) technology is an effective means of overcoming network impairments and providing high-quality service in commercial and military wireless-communications systems, especially with streaming data signals.

MRF: What attracted you to join this company?

Oppenheimer: There are two things you look for in an entrepreneurial situation. One is a very big profit. Big markets are where big opportunities are made. The other is some distinguishing characteristics in the company. And this company had both of those in place. This technology can be used in some many different systems: cellular, Internet, defense communications. It is limitless. The technology at its core is the result of the scientific breakthroughs of two leaders in the field, Dr. Michael Luby (co-founder and chief technology officer) and Dr. Amin Shokrollahi (chief scientist) of Digital Fountain.

Just to give you a sense of the accolades that these guys receive: in February there was a dedication down in San Diego for a new school in information sciences. They invited scientists for all around the world to join in a several-days-long celebratory event. The opening plenary panel with people like Andy Viterbi and Mike Luby. The moderator asked some questions to open things up and when he got to Mike Luby he asked how it was that he and Amin were the ones who are outside of the traditional information theory community but you were the ones who proved Shannon's theory of an information-ideal code. And to have them recognized among that class of audience just said so much about the technical basis for the company.

MRF: Did you see in the opportunity presented by Digital Fountain that you were a missing piece?

Oppenheimer: To be accurate, I actually joined the company a little before that. I wasn't looking at it as simply an opportunity to run the company. But it was really that the technology could be used in so many different arenas that I felt the company had the potential to be the Dolby of communications.

MRF: Do you see a little Digital Fountain "DF" logo on equipment the way the Dolby Labs logo is so pervasive on audio and broadcast equipment?

Oppenheimer: We are seeking to make the technology pervasive across so many applications. If at some point that it becomes that way there may well be value for our customers that feature it in that way. When companies put that Dolby logo on their products, it conveys a certain level of quality and performance. We certainly would like to be able to convey that type of value to our customers' products.

MRF: There is a certain level of confidence that comes from the "Intel Inside" logo or the Dolby Labs mark on a product. There is a feeling that you are buying quality, and that would be something to aspire to for a DF logo.

Oppenheimer: There are lots of companies that are trying to get their technologies licensed and they look to get their logo featured. We're a little different in that we are first focused on the application. The market perceptions will follow our deliver, not the other way around.

MRF: Not fully understanding your technology, perhaps you could explain an element about it: is it necessary for you to understand the nature of the transmitted errors in order to correct for them?

Oppenheimer: Actually, no. You don't need to know a lot of information about the signal. In the field of forward-error correction, there are two general classes of codes. There is a class known as error coding and a class known as erasure coding. Error coding is used everywhere. Any digital communications system in the world has error coding in it. Every hard drive has error coding. Error coding allows you to correct information that was somehow corrupted in transmission. Erasure coding is a complement to that. It allows you to recover data that was lost in transmission. You use it with error coding. But its use in communications is much newer. The technology that we are licensing is erase coding.

Really all you need is to know that there was an amount of information lost. If you know the total amount of information that needs to be conveyed, and you know how much was lost, then what our technology allows you to precisely determine the content of what was lost. Unlike error coding and some other erase coding approaches, this technology performs independently of the amount of loss, the pattern of loss, whether it is burst or random, but it doesn't matter to our technology.