Quite the 18 Months

My last post was December 2019, putting this at nearly 18 months since I last wrote anything here. It's not for lack of interest, but simply I was massively overloaded with work, commitments, and personal issues that meant something had to go, and so it was the blogging. Things are somewhat more stable now, so I'm intending on getting back to this on a semi-regular basis. Interestingly my first post on this blog was 15th April 2016, so just over 5 years now since I started it. Long enough that my NDA with uBeam has now expired - though don't expect any changes in what I write, things traditionally and reasonably covered by an NDA are not things I will talk about even on uBeam.

So what have I been up to? Well, I quit my full time job at the beginning of 2020 to concentrate on a company I co-founded with the other VP Engineering from uBeam, Sean Taffler. The company is Acoustiic, and our goal is to enable the next generation of non-invasive cancer surgery using High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU). 

This is a well known technique, currently growing in applications, with an increasing number of FDA approvals and insurance reimbursements - if you want to read more there's a great resource at the Focused Ultrasound Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to enabling better medical outcomes from ultrasound. What we aim to offer is the next generation of systems for HIFU - more precise, more controllable, faster - using advanced manufacturing techniques, custom electronics, and leveraging the compute power available today. Sean did an interview with the FUS Foundation on FDA approvals recently, you can read it here.

The other thing that was eating up my time is that starting in 2020 I became both the President of the IEEE Society for Ultrasonics, Ferroelectrics, and Frequency Control (UFFC) and the General Co-Chair for our largest conference. Each is a fairly hectic job under normal conditions, but add in starting a new company and a pandemic and everything goes to hell - shifting a ~2000 person conference from in-person to all online at short notice, while negotiating with the original venue not to lose a large deposit, was certainly a novel experience. It was a lot of work, but also gave us the opportunity to pull forward online presentation options years faster than would be possible otherwise. For those interested in some of the things we did, there are some newsletter articles I wrote for UFFC that can be found here (May 20, August 20, November 20, April 20). I also did an article on SBIR (Small Business Innovation and Research) grants for the IEEE, it's here and I will also post here as a blog post now it's been up a while.

There are still a few uBeam stories to be told, and I'll get to them over time, but I'll likely be transitioning to talking about other startup and fundraising topics since that's the world I'm living in now. So, let's see if I can do a little better than 18 months for my next post...