Mitch Altman

Mitch Altman
Mitch Altman at the Chaos Communication Camp 2011
Born	(1956-12-22) December 22, 1956 (age 60)
Alma mater	University of Illinois
Occupation	Inventor
Website	TV-B-Gone

Mitch Altman (born December 22, 1956) is a San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone, as featured speaker at hacker conferences, as international expert on the hackerspace movement, and for teaching introductory electronics workshops. He is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics.

Altman grew up in Rogers Park, Chicago, Illinois. After kindergarten his family moved to Highland Park, Illinois. Altman graduated from Deerfield High School (Illinois) in 1975. Altman is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he earned an undergraduate degree (1980) and a master's degree (1984) in electrical engineering. While at the University of Illinois, Altman co-organized the first Hash Wednesday in Champaign-Urbana in 1977. Altman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 to work in Silicon Valley.

Altman was an early developer of Virtual Reality technologies, working at VPL Research with Jaron Lanier. Altman left VPL Research in protest when it accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense.

Altman co-founded Silicon Valley start-up 3ware in February 1997 with J. Peter Herz and Jim MacDonald (who is on the advisory board of Cornfield Electronics).

Altman started Cornfield Electronics as a consulting company. After the launch of TV-B-Gone Altman gave the company the tagline "We make Useful Electronics for a Better World".

Following extensive involvement in the "Maker" movement and Make magazine, including being featured in a Make magazine April Fool's Day prank, Altman publicly parted ways with the Maker Faire in 2012 after the Maker Faire accepted contracts with the United States Department of Defense.

In 2004 Altman released a one-button universal remote control called TV-B-Gone, to be used for turning off TVs in public places. Altman used money from the sale of 3ware to pay for the manufacture of the first 20,000 units of TV-B-Gone. By February 2014, he was reported to have sold more than 500,000 units. He is currently selling the TV-B-Gone generation 4. He also invented a new product called the TV-B-Gone SHP (Super High Power).