Founder

Kibeam helps kids and families learn, play, and connect in a totally new way - through kinetic interaction with both digital media and a broad range of physical media, including existing printed books and magazines. Kibeam's platform has been called a Wii for books and a 21st century LeapPad.

When wirelessly loaded with content, Kibeam's handheld, screenless, multimodal wand will read an existing child's paper book aloud, with no change to a book already on a child's bookshelf -- or borrowed from a local library -- and engage the child with curated, multimodal activities. For literacy and language development, Kibeam's wand helps develops phonetic decoding skills, increases vocabulary, models sentence structure, immerses kids in narrative stories, and introduces early learners to expository text with embodied learning. For math and other subjects, Kibeam's platform merges movement with interaction to create new, engaging, and rewarding local and virtual experiences, enhanced with family participation.

Eyefluence developed eye-tracking and eye-interaction technology that allows users to interact in the virtual and augmented reality spaces using only their eyes. It was acquired by Google in 2016.

The company that created the world’s first smart pen and revolutionized the way people record their thoughts. Livescribe was acquired by Anoto in 2015.

LeapFrog Enterprises creates entertainment-based educational tools for children. Its flagship product and Jim’s invention, the LeapPad, achieved over one billion dollars in sales.

Explore Technologies created the innovative world geography education tool known as the Odyssey Atlasphere, an interactive, talking globe. Explore was acquired by LeapFrog in 1998.

Lexico was co-founded by Jim in 1992, with the goal of creating an interactive globe. While the company ended up failing to achieve its goals, Jim cites it as an important learning experience in his journey as a founder. It led to his success with his next company Explore Technologies.

StrataCom revolutionized high-speed network equipment. Acquired by Cisco in 1996 for $4.5 billion, the company produced the FastPacket IPX, the world’s first commercial ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) switch.