David Levy (born December 30, 1962) is an inventor with more than a dozen patents. He also served as "Inventor in Residence" to Arthur D. Little Consulting. He received a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering with a concentration in architecture and master's degree in mechanical engineering at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

in 1987 and a doctorate in mechanical engineering from MIT in 1997. Between degrees he worked for five years at Apple, replacing the Trackball with the first Touchpad and repositioning the laptop keyboard from the front to the back. He is a native of Manhattan Beach,

California California () is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States that lies on the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. It borders Oregon to the north, Nevada and Arizona to the east, and shares Mexico–United States border, an ...

and lived in

Cambridge, Massachusetts Cambridge ( ) is a city in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. It is a suburb in the Greater Boston metropolitan area, located directly across the Charles River from Boston. The city's population as of the 2020 United States census, ...

,archive.fortune.com
/ref> for many years, but as of 2010 has been a resident of

Berkeley, California Berkeley ( ) is a city on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay in northern Alameda County, California, United States. It is named after the 18th-century Anglo-Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley. It borders the cities of Oakland, Cali ...

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

venture capital Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to start-up company, startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in ...

to license his own

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

s. In 1999, Levy started a company called Digit Wireless, with the help of

angel investor An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital to a business or businesses, including startups, usually in exchange for convertible de ...

s and venture capital, ultimately raising $21 million. Digit Wireless was started with the purpose of developing Levy's Fastap keypad technology for cell phones/PDA devices. As of 2007, there were three Fastap-enabled cell phones introduced in North America—two in Canada and one in the United States. In 2003, he invented the concept of tracing a finger over the image of a QWERTY keyboard to indicate which word the user is trying to type, for which he received US patent 7,175,438. Digit Wireless was sold to Nuance Communications in March, 2010. In 2013 he joined Innovate America, LLC, a Boston-based biotechnology startup as a business consultant. Levy restructured the company and renamed it "OH2 Laboratories", then to focus exclusively on monetizing a collection of patents on solubilizing G-Protein Coupled Receptors, a technology invented by Shuguang Zhang PhD and licensed from MIT. The OH2 business plan is to use solubilized GPCRs as a new path to drug discovery, especially monoclonal antibodies.

Inventions

* Peelables—layered self-adhering labels that peel off to uncover new ones, licensed to 3M and

BASF BASF SE (), an initialism of its original name , is a European Multinational corporation, multinational company and the List of largest chemical producers, largest chemical producer in the world. Its headquarters are located in Ludwigshafen, Ge ...

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. Licensed by Kryponite Corp, but not developed into a product. * Trace Fast Typing Method (US Patent 7175438) - Acquired by

Nuance Communications Nuance Communications, Inc. is an American multinational computer software technology corporation, headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, that markets speech recognition and artificial intelligence software. Nuance merged with its comp ...

. * 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).

References

External links

MIT.edu
* http://www.digitwireless.com 21st-century American inventors Living people MIT School of Engineering alumni 1962 births {{US-inventor-stub