Pharos Science & Applications, Inc. ("Pharos") is a privately held consumer-electronics and GPS navigation company headquartered at 411 Amapola Ave., Torrance, California. It was founded in March 1998 by president James Oyang, a physicist with a background in aerospace and particle physics, and named after the ancient lighthouse of Alexandria. The company is not publicly traded; no parent or acquirer has been confirmed in public sources. A 2009 Daily Breeze profile put headcount at roughly 35 employees, and third-party data aggregator Kona Equity estimates 79 employees and about $15.6M in annual revenue — figures that are unverified and should be treated as rough estimates only.
Pharos develops and sells GPS navigation hardware and software: portable GPS receivers for vehicles, GPS-enabled smartphones and PDAs (notably its Traveler series of Windows Mobile devices), external Bluetooth/wireless GPS receivers, and street-routing and location-based navigation software. It has also supplied GPS receivers bundled with Microsoft Streets & Trips, and partnered with Coastline Community College on PDA-based memory-assistance programs for brain-injury patients. Product lines have been distributed through Best Buy, Office Depot, Amazon, and Dell.
On litigation posture, Pharos is an operating company that appears in this database primarily as a defendant/respondent (1 defendant case, 1 plaintiff case) — not a patent assertion entity. Its one plaintiff-side appearance is an appeal, not an offensive suit. Both tracked matters arise from a single dispute.
The two cases stem from In re Certain GPS Devices and Products Containing Same, Inv. No. 337-TA-602, an ITC Section 337 investigation initiated in May 2007 on a complaint by Global Locate, Inc. (later acquired by Broadcom). Pharos was named a respondent alongside SiRF Technology, MiTAC, Mio, and E-TEN. The Commission found a Section 337 violation in January 2009 and issued a limited exclusion order and cease-and-desist orders; the Federal Circuit affirmed in SiRF Technology, Inc. v. International Trade Commission, 601 F.3d 1319 (Fed. Cir. 2010), where Pharos appeared as an appellant/plaintiff. A later enforcement/modification proceeding (2010) also named Pharos. All cases concern Assisted-GPS chip and receiver technology; venue is the ITC and Federal Circuit rather than a district court.