It is with much sadness that Singapore say goodbye to her true-blue visionary and entrepreneur Sim Wong Hoo, the founder, chairman and CEO of Creative Technologies. The tech pioneer, who became Singapore’s youngest billionaire at the age of 45, was best known for the Sound Blaster sound cards, which dominated the personal computer audio market till the early 2000s.
In May 2006, Creative sued Apple, saying that the iPod and iPod Nano infringed on a patent that the company had for the interface in its Zen media player. Apple countersued. The legal dispute was eventually settled with US$100 million paid by Apple, granting them license to a patent for the hierarchical user interface used in Creative’s products.
In an interview with CNBC, Sim spoke about his belief that Apple had taken their ideas.
It was something we had to do because Apple did not just… infringe our patent. Actually, Steve [Jobs] came to our booth, saw our products and liked the product. He saw the future of Apple there.
But when Apple founder Steve Jobs died of complications due to pancreatic cancer in 2011, Sim, in a show of grace, took out a full page newspaper ad to pay tribute to him.
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