Kazuo Kashio: a giant in miniaturisation

This was probably my favourite moment of last week: meeting Kazuo Kashio - yes, that "Mr Casio" - one of the four brothers who, among other things, invented the digital calculator. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, a city where bigger is always held to be better, Mr Kashio, a giant figure in the history of gadgets stood out - for his habit of thinking small.

The president and chief executive of Casio, who celebrated his 76th birthday amid the hubub of the world's largest gadgets show, is one of the industry's legendary soothsayers. Credited with an uncanny ability to know what people want, he claims he can tell whether a device will sell "instantly".

The extrovert among the four brothers who were the company's first employees in 1957 Mr Kashio was quickly picked to be the marketing man. Their debut product was the Casio 14-A, the world's first digital calculator, a device as big as a desk. Half a century later, he still personally approves each Casio product, and dreamed up many of them himself.

"My best idea? The Casio Mini," he says without hesitation.

"I gave it deep thought," he adds, referring to the first miniture digital calculator, created in 1972. "At that time, for ordinary
people, calculation every day was troublesome, cumbersome. So here comes the idea: Can we make it easier to do calculations?"

The idea was the first in a string of worldwide successes. Last week, the billionth Casio calculator rolled off the company's production line.

In the time it's taken to churn them out, Casio has grown to a group with 12,000 employees and has moved into fields such as mobile phones, digital watches and digital cameras. And while the electronics industry might have changed beyond recognition, Mr Kashio's philosophy has remained constant. "Every single year there has been such huge innovation; it is constantly accelerating," he says. "What we have to keep in mind is to always, always, innovate, that is the art: always pioneer."

This is the spirit under which Casio's army of 2,000 research
engineers, a team granted a budget of 5 per cent of sales a year
(revenues came in at $5 billion in 2006), sets out in order to perfect
the technologies "that will put the new breathe into Casio's products, he says.

The current focus is on power supply. This year, Casio aims to ship the first of its new ultra-compact fuel cell batteries for use in mobile gadgets. The cell stack device has the highest level of power density per unit volume in the world, the company claims.

Suggestions that a gadget could have reached the end of line,
innovated to perfection, leave Mr Kashio cold. No matter that Casio already builds a solar watch that never runs out of power, links up via radio to a nuclear clock, ensuring it is always accurate, and is guaranteed to be virtually indestructible. A watch that tells the right time, all the time, is only the start.

"The potential of the digital watch is infinite," he says. Soon the
wrist will become a common site for internet devices, cameras, even video, he predicts. "We can put these into a timepiece - but our competence is that we can make it very compact."

It is the digital camera market that now forms Casio's "core
competency", and which Mr Kashio is eager to promote at CES. The company introduced the first camera with an LCD screen in 1995. "At that time, yes, there was a digital camera, but not for consumers. Now we had the idea: can we make a digital camera that is always wearable; anywhere, anytime. We wanted to create the ubiquitous type of camera," he says.

"How do I measure success? Always foresee. And to do that I am putting my expertise and soul into this company."

So, as a young man, the son of a rice paddy farmer, did Mr Kashio, the legendary trend spotter, predict he would be in his current position?

"Never," he says with smirk.