Amazon.com has just invested more than $12 million in capital into the invention of Paul Judge, an African American entrepreneur and technologist who graduated from Morehouse College and earned his Ph.D. in network security at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Judge and his long-time colleague, Mike Van Bruinisse, are the co-founders of a company called Luma that produces a unique home wireless router designed to improve connection-speed quality and decrease dead Wi-Fi spots in your house. Affordably priced at just $149, the router performs similar to a surround-sound speaker system - putting an end to the old-fashioned technology where devices have to search for the best connection spot.
In fact, it's called "surround wi-fi", and it also offers built-in security protection similar to what was previously available only to businesses.
Why Amazon is interested
In a recent interview, Judge told Forbes Magazine that Amazon is looking to integrate the Luma router into their Echo and Alexa products, which act as voice-activated virtual-assistants.
He told TheRoot.com, "We're solving the issue of bad Internet. People spend nearly $8 billion per year buying routers. We developed Luma to answer the question of how we can make home networks better, smarter and safer, but not annoying."
"There are problems Luma can take care of; like when a guest connects to the network, you’ll have the ability to prevent viruses on their computer connecting to anything on your network," he added.
30,000 units already pre-sold
Judge and Bruinisse say that they’ve already pre-sold more than 30,000 units, meaning they already have more than $2 million in anticipated sales. They expect to begin shipping by the end of spring 2016, and investment from Amazon.com will help them to accelerate the company’s growth.
But wait, there's more
Judge is not at all new to the technology game. He is an inventor of about 30 patented and patent-pending computer security technologies, and has spearheaded multiple research initiatives and founded the Internet Research Task Force’s Anti-Spam Research Group.
He is also a recognized authority on information security issues, having authored numerous papers that have been published in leading academic journals and presented at multiple industry and academic conferences.
For more details about Paul Judge, visit www.pjudge.com
For more details about his company, Luma, visit www.getluma.com