David Levy - inventor with over a dozen patents, he also served as "Inventor in Residence" to Arthur D. Little Consulting. He received his B.S., M.S. (1987) and Ph.D. (1997) in Mechanical Engineering from MIT. He is a Manhattan Beach

Manhattan Beach, California

Manhattan Beach is the wealthiest beachfront city located in southwestern Los Angeles County, California, USA. The city is on the Pacific coast, south of El Segundo, and north of Hermosa Beach. Manhattan Beach is the home of both beach and indoor volleyball, and surfing. During the winter, the...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

 native, but now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In 1989, he started his first company TH, Inc., without venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 to license

License

The verb license or grant licence means to give permission. The noun license or licence refers to that permission as well as to the document recording that permission.A license may be granted by a party to another party as an element of an agreement...

 his own patent

Patent

A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....

s.

In 1999, Levy started a new company, Digit Wireless http://www.digitwireless.com, with the help of angel investor

Angel investor

An angel investor or angel is an affluent individual who provides capital for a business start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity...

s and venture capital. Digit Wireless was started with the purpose of developing Levy's Fastap keypad technology for cell phones/ PDA devices. As of 2007, there have been 3 Fastap-enabled cell phones introduced in North America -- 2 of them in Canada and one in the United States.

Inventions

• Peelables—layered self-adhering labels that peel off to uncover new ones, licensed to 3M
  3M
  3M Company , formerly known as the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company, is an American multinational conglomerate corporation based in Maplewood, Minnesota, United States....
  
   and BASF
  BASF
  BASF SE is the largest chemical company in the world and is headquartered in Germany. BASF originally stood for Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik . Today, the four letters are a registered trademark and the company is listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, London Stock Exchange, and Zurich Stock...
  
   for video cassettes and computer diskettes.
• Fastap keypad, formerly known as OneTouch. Recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's smallest keypad
• Wedgie bicycle seat lock, to prevent bicycle seats from being stolen
• Improved Vascular Splicing Method" using biocompatible O-rings to minimize blood contamination and reduce the time to seal blood vessels during surgery;
• Pass-It TV remote control, designed to be thrown around like a football (co-invented with 1997 Lemelson-MIT Student Prize winner Nathan Kane).

External links

• http://web.mit.edu/Invent/a-winners/a-levy.html
• http://www.digitwireless.com