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Jim Barthold
Just when Chuck Kaplan seemed to be catching a hot wave with Philips Electronics, he's jumped back into the foaming waters as PowerTV's VP-marketing.
Kaplan, as Philips' VP/GM of North American cable business, recently scored his biggest win when Philips nailed a 1 million digital box order from AT&T Broadband. Now he's on the tumultuous side of the business with an interactive software vendor.
"You know me, I look for turmoil," Kaplan says with a laugh. "That's why I feel OK about earning a salary and going to work every day."
Kaplan will now go to work for a company that's engaged in the evolving business of developing operating systems and middleware for digital set-tops. PowerTV's customer base includes founder and lead shareholder Scientific-Atlanta, Panasonic Consumer Electronics, Pioneer New Media Technologies and Pace Micro Technology.
There are those who feel the company is still too tightly linked to S-A, but Kaplan is not one of them.
"Scientific-Atlanta will certainly do anything they can to enhance the value of the company because it helps them, too," he says. "If that means allowing the company to move much more into the public domain, open systems, then gee whiz, why not?"
Why not with Philips as a customer?
"I can imagine not only Philips, but a lot of other consumer electronics companies recognizing the value of what has to be the smallest, most efficient, most de-bugged system in the industry," Kaplan says. "There's a lot of untapped value in PowerTV, and part of my job is to help it achieve its potential."
At the same time, Kaplan hopes to achieve his own potential.
"I have an opportunity to work on the software side of the business," he says. "Don't look at that as a reflection on anything but me and instinct about where some hot spots in the industry are."
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