Stuart Neubarth

Stuart earned Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Stuart has been an electronics enthusiast since high school. While a Stanford student and member of the Stanford Radio Club, he designed a tracking satellite antenna and electronics to “hack” Soviet satellites and decode live Soviet television, for which there was considerable interest during the Cold War.

With funding from Stanford and philanthropist Henry Dakin, Stuart went into business as SK Communications, Inc. - designing, manufacturing, and installing satellite tracking and Soviet TV decoding equipment.

Live Soviet television proved extremely popular with Russian language professors and students, as well as those who made their living monitoring Soviet TV during the era of Mikhail Gorbachev and Perestroika. Stuart designed, manufactured, and installed systems at the think-tank RAND Corporation in Santa Monica (where Henry Kissinger was a fan), Brown University, the government of Bahrain, and several locations in Kuwait.

As the cold war ended, interest in Soviet TV waned, and Stuart applied his engineering talents designing equipment to reverse-engineer and decode signals for the US government. Looking for more interesting projects, he re-purposed SK Communications as an engineering design firm.

SK Communications, Inc. brought together engineers and entrepreneurs to create new inventions and turn them into products. Notable projects were:

Palm inductive charging technology. Inductive charging was incorporated into all Palm cell phone and tablet products. SK Communications created demo versions, the first production version (discrete implementation), and the final custom integrated circuit version.

Sportvision yellow first down line. SK Communications designed all of the telemetry hardware and software.

Coinstar coin-counting kiosks. SK Communications developed the first production units as well as the coin sensing technology.

In late 2011, Apple expressed interest in acquire SK Communications for the purpose of undertaking several research and development projects. Stuart and the employees eventually agreed with Apple’s terms, and SK Communications, Inc. was purchased by Apple.

At Apple, Stuart and his team researched new sensing technologies and created prototypes and new technology demonstrations.

In 2014, with the initial Apple research projects completed, Stuart left Apple to go back to doing what he loves - bringing engineering talent together to create new products. The new firm is SK2X. The “2” is a reference to the post-Apple reincarnation of SK Communications. The “X” implies experiments and inventions.

Stuart is a licensed pilot, radio amateur, and certified SCUBA diver. He speaks both German and Spanish.