Kevin Warnock



La forma de jugar en España ha cambiado de manera notable en la última década. Mientras que el casino tradicional mantiene un público fiel que busca la experiencia social y el ambiente de las salas, el casino online ha crecido hasta convertirse en la opción preferida por millones de usuarios que valoran la comodidad y la variedad. Según datos recientes del sector, más del 60 % de los jugadores españoles ha probado al menos una plataforma digital, frente a un 35 % que sigue acudiendo de forma habitual a locales físicos. Conocer las diferencias entre ambos entornos ayuda a elegir con criterio. Puede encontrar más detalles en tiradas gratis de casino.

Experiencia, ambiente y ritmo de juego

En un casino físico, la experiencia va más allá del propio juego. Las luces, el sonido de las fichas y la presencia de otros jugadores generan una atmósfera difícil de replicar en pantalla. Sin embargo, esa misma intensidad puede resultar abrumadora para quien prefiere un entorno tranquilo y controlado desde su propio domicilio.

El ritmo también difiere de forma clara. En una mesa presencial, cada mano depende del crupier y de los turnos de los demás participantes, lo que ralentiza el juego. En cambio, en una plataforma digital puedes jugar varias rondas por minuto y decidir cuándo detenerte sin presión social.

Otro aspecto relevante es la privacidad. Muchos jugadores españoles valoran poder gestionar sus partidas sin miradas ajenas, algo que el entorno online facilita de manera natural y que reduce la sensación de exposición.

Ofertas, bonos y límites de apuesta

Aquí es donde el contraste resulta más evidente. Un casino físico rara vez ofrece promociones más allá de algún torneo puntual o una consumición gratuita. La estructura de costes de las salas limita mucho este tipo de incentivos.

El entorno digital, por el contrario, compite de forma agresiva mediante bonificaciones. Por ejemplo, plataformas como Spin Casino online aplican promociones que pueden alcanzar el 100 % del primer depósito hasta 1.000 EUR, además de rondas gratis y programas de fidelización con devoluciones semanales. Son cifras que ninguna sala presencial puede igualar.

Los límites también varían. En un casino físico, las apuestas mínimas suelen partir de 1 EUR o 5 EUR por tirada, mientras que online es posible jugar desde 0,10 EUR, lo que amplía el acceso a presupuestos muy distintos y favorece una gestión más flexible del bankroll.

Seguridad, control y juego responsable

Ambos entornos están regulados por la Dirección General de Ordenación del Juego, por lo que la legalidad está garantizada en España. La diferencia está en las herramientas de control que ofrece cada uno.

Las plataformas digitales permiten establecer límites de depósito, tiempo de sesión y autoexclusión con apenas unos clics. Esa inmediatez, junto a los registros de actividad, facilita un seguimiento más preciso del comportamiento de juego.

En el casino físico, el control depende en mayor medida de la autodisciplina del jugador, ya que no existen bloqueos automáticos equivalentes. La combinación de ambas opciones, eligiendo la que mejor encaje con cada perfil, es hoy la vía más sensata para disfrutar del juego con responsabilidad.



Por qué los fines de semana concentran las mejores ofertas

El comportamiento del jugador español cambia notablemente de lunes a domingo. Según datos del sector, alrededor del 42% del volumen total de apuestas en plataformas online en España se concentra entre el viernes por la tarde y el domingo por la noche. Esa concentración de actividad empuja a los operadores a competir con promociones específicas para captar atención en las horas de mayor tráfico. Lea más al respecto en slots gratis.

El resultado es un calendario promocional que se repite con bastante regularidad: bonos de recarga, giros gratis, torneos de tragamonedas y cuotas mejoradas en eventos deportivos. Conocer ese patrón permite planificar el juego y exprimir cada oferta en lugar de reaccionar con prisas al último mensaje recibido.

No todas las promociones valen lo mismo. Un bono del 100% hasta 50 EUR puede ser excelente si las condiciones de apuesta son razonables, pero decepcionante si exige multiplicar el importe 40 veces antes de retirar. La clave está en leer la letra pequeña antes de aceptar cualquier oferta.

Cómo evaluar una promoción antes de aceptarla

El primer dato que conviene revisar es el requisito de apuesta (wagering). En el mercado español, lo habitual oscila entre x20 y x40. Cuanto menor sea ese multiplicador, más fácil resultará convertir el bono en saldo retirable. Un bono de 20 EUR con requisito x25 exige apostar 500 EUR en total; uno con x40 eleva la cifra a 800 EUR.

También importa el plazo de validez. Muchas promociones de fin de semana caducan en 48 o 72 horas, lo que obliga a jugar con cierta intensidad. Si no se cumplen las condiciones a tiempo, el bono y las ganancias asociadas desaparecen.

Otros factores decisivos son la contribución de cada juego al wagering (las tragamonedas suelen aportar el 100%, mientras que el póker o el blackjack pueden aportar solo el 10%) y el límite máximo de retirada derivado del bono. Revisar estos cuatro puntos antes de activar una oferta evita sorpresas desagradables.

Un ejemplo de estructura promocional bien diseñada es la que ofrece sorteosonline, donde las condiciones se presentan de forma clara y los requisitos se mantienen dentro de parámetros competitivos. La transparencia en los términos es, en sí misma, un indicador de calidad del operador.

Estrategias prácticas para maximizar el rendimiento

Aprovechar bien un fin de semana promocional requiere algo más que aceptar el primer bono que aparece. Estas pautas ayudan a rentabilizar cada oferta:

• Comparar al menos tres operadores antes del viernes y quedarse con la promoción de mejor relación entre importe y wagering.
• Reservar el saldo del bono para juegos que contribuyan al 100% del requisito de apuesta.
• Fijar un presupuesto semanal y no superarlo aunque aparezcan ofertas tentadoras de última hora.
• Llevar un registro sencillo de bonos activados, plazos y progreso del wagering.
• Aprovechar las cuotas mejoradas en deporte solo cuando exista un conocimiento real del evento.

Las promociones de fin de semana pueden aportar valor real si se abordan con criterio. La diferencia entre un jugador que gana y otro que pierde rara vez está en la suerte: está en leer las condiciones, comparar opciones y jugar con un plan definido antes de que llegue el sábado.

A lot has happened since I last wrote here more than half a decade ago.

My wife and I had a son. My wife graduated from community college and then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley. She will graduate this year. Our daughter is in first grade and is thriving. Her extracurriculars include ballet, ice skating, parkour, guitar, piano, software development and acting. Our son is taking ballet, music and ice skating classes.

My dear parents Martha and Robert passed away. I miss them. They both met our son, thankfully.

I retired in February, 2020 at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. It was too risky to continue as an innkeeper at my home. It was a fun and wild ride. Between 2014 and 2020 I hosted over six-thousand travelers from seventy-four countries. Most of these travelers I found through Airbnb, but some were through couchsurfing.org. I credit my current marriage to being an innkeeper. I didn’t meet my wife as a host, but after we met she did end up staying at my home, and she never left. We’ve been together over a decade now. It’s been a magical decade… the best decade of my life.

Our daughter is vivacious and outgoing. She met and lived with two-thousand guests before I retired. Starting when she was only seventeen months old, she would shake hands with every guest at the front door, even if eight guests arrived at once. She would push their luggage to their room or rooms, even though the height of their luggage often exceeded her height. Now that she’s older, my wife sometimes takes her to conferences, and our daughter charms the attendees. Would this be the case without my time as an Innkeeper?

During summer break in 2023 my wife was an intern at a software company in Stockholm, Sweden, as part of a study abroad program arranged by her university. I didn’t want to stay in one place for the summer, even though Stockholm is an amazing city. So, after getting my wife settled into her apartment, I rented a car and took the kids on an eight thousand mile road trip. We only encountered one other individual parent traveling with children, and his kids were much older than one and five years old.

We drove from Stockholm and took a ferry to Denmark. From Denmark we took a ferry to Germany. Then we drove to Poland. Then back to Germany and onto Austria.

We were stopped by the police as we entered Austria. The very young officers checked our passports and sent us on our way. The hotel clerk that night said we were stopped for our Swedish license plate. We never saw any Swedish plates once we left Denmark, so I can see the officer’s concern. We didn’t receive a citation as I was very careful to drive at the speed limit, as there are speed cameras on many roads in Europe, and I drive the speed limit in the rest of the world too. The way the police pull you over in Austria is they drive in front of you and display a text message to you on a rear facing roof mounted illuminated sign. The message rotates through multiple languages, including English. It said “Please follow me.” Even though I saw it I could not believe they meant for me to actually follow them. So, I ignored it. The Police maneuvered alongside my car and the second officer opened their window and flashed their badge and motioned for me to follow them. I did. They spoke English well and never inquired why I had two young children with me or asked where their mother was. It was a brief encounter, but they did take our passports to their car for a few minutes, presumably to run in their computer. The hotel clerk said they get many reports from guests of the police stopping them at the border too.

It was late and the restaurants were closed. We stopped at a food truck that didn’t accept cards for payment. I didn’t carry cash as it’s not needed these days in Europe. We were about to go hungry, but a nice American couple in line stepped in and paid for dinner for all of us. They were from Palo Alto, California, just a short distance from my home in San Francisco. We had a nice talk. They were on an organized tour and were amazed I was just driving around Europe for months with two young children.

Next we went to Trieste, Italy, where my brother was born during one of our overseas adventures during my childhood. My father worked as a physicist in Yugoslavia at the time. He was paid in the local currency which was apparently difficult to spend in Italy, so we did our grocery shopping in Yugoslavia. My parents said the canned food didn’t have pictures and they could not read the labels, so we only discovered the contents at home when the cans were opened.

My brother and his family joined us in Trieste and we had a nice time seeing the city together. He had not been back since the year of his birth. I had been back in 2008.

Then we drove to Venice and met up with my brother’s family a second time.

After Italy, we went to France, Monaco, Spain, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands before heading back to Denmark and Sweden. We were on the road about two months. My wife flew to Spain to meet up with us in Barcelona and the surrounding area.

Once back in Sweden, I took the kids to Helsinki, Finland by car. I stopped along the way to visit a friend I hadn’t seen since we were both teenagers. We took a ferry to return to Sweden, saving days of driving. I wanted to drive to Finland because I wanted to experience the sun never setting.

I learned about a Covid-19 dashboard website that updates the world on the Covid-19 virus once a minute, by scraping other websites around the world.

Here is the url: https://ncov2019.live/data

Here is an article about this dashboard, which was built by and is maintained by high school student Avi Schiffmann in the United States. He started it in December 2019, when there were only reported cases in China. Impressive foresight.

Today is Tuesday, March 10, 2020. I have been staying at home for the last week or so to avoid contracting the Covid 19 virus. I have been reading the news, and have seen pictures of empty subway trains during San Francisco rush hour. I figured that would mean people would not be out shopping either. I was wrong. I went to Home Depot to return some items I don’t need, and the store seemed just as busy as any other Tuesday. Then I went to Target to get some hand soap. The store was perhaps a bit slower than normal, maybe 80% of normal. The store had no liquid hand soap for sale, and no hand sanitizer. Most of the bar soap was sold out too. Then I went to Safeway, and the store was just as busy as normal. They had two large bottles of liquid hand soap, but only two, and I bought them, as I am washing may hands so many times per day that I will go through these in the next two months.

I saw hundreds of people during this afternoon of shopping, and nobody had on a mask, and nobody was trying to keep a safe distance from anyone else that I could see. I never saw anyone change their walking path to stay six feet away from someone approaching.

I wore my N100 welding fume mask and rubber gloves, and changed my shoes when I got home and washed my hands for more than twenty seconds. I don’t understand the appeal of paper N95 masks, which currently sell for a fortune. I think non-disposable N100 masks with a rubber face seal should be the minimum people consider given the consequences. I know the current guidelines call for nobody other than health care workers to wear any mask, but I am suspicious this advice is due to an insufficient number of masks available, not that N95 or N100 masks convey no protection. I wore my mask for hours when I learned to weld, so I got used to it, and fortunately I bought a second mask back then, so I am now wearing a brand new mask that does not have any welding fume odor.

There are thirteen confirmed cases of Covid 19 in San Francisco, but almost nobody can get tested, so there are probably far more cases that are not yet diagnosed. I will happily wear my N100 mask when not at home for the foreseeable future. I worry San Francisco residents by the hundreds or even thousands will soon come down with Covid 19 illness, and that all this mask-free activity will prove to be deadly. Just yesterday Italy ‘locked down’ the entire country and suspended all debt payments, including mortgage payments. I can imagine San Francisco locked down by the end of this month or April, 2020 at the latest.

On Sunday afternoon, November 2, 2014, I had the pleasure of attending the first annual Intel Make it Wearable to identify exciting technology companies making or proposing to make computers that one wears rather than carries or is stationary.

Make it Wearable is an ambitious new competition, and it’s the most polished and exciting competition I have attended. That’s saying something as I have attended dozens of competitions over the years.

The ten finalists come from China, Chile, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States. The ideas were wonderfully diverse as you’ll soon learn which helped to keep the event lively and full of surprises. Sex appeal for business competitions is desirable because it helps attract the press and future competitors. I saw reporters from Yahoo and CNet at the event, and even reporters from the Middle East.

Venus Williams listening to a pitch as a judge for the 2014 Intel Make it Wearable competition on November 2, 2014. Note the Intel chip containing Microsoft Surface Pro tablet computer Williams is holding. The judges voted via these tablets.

Before I jump into the companies, allow me to talk about the event venue, the W Hotel across the street from the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California USA. This was a great choice. The W is very fashionable. It’s not dull and boring like so many big hotels. Intel didn’t just go with a standard W event room though. A designer outfitted the rooms with custom wall textiles that resembled old barn wood and white painted bricks. This theme carried through to the custom printed name tags. There were light sculptures that featured dozens of clear globed incandescent light bulbs dimmed enough you could see the glowing filaments without squinting. These bulbs were dangling down on wires, and the idea was to reference the light bulb over the head to bring up the idea of a fresh new idea being thought up.

There was a disc jockey ever present in the two rooms, though one used her RFID embedded fake fingernails to manipulate a musical track by dipping her fingers in a shallow clear box of water. She got a lot of attention for this, and it was mesmerizing to watch. I learned this was her first gig playing music by playing with water.

The rooms were packed, and the crowd was surprisingly stylish and hip… far, far more hip than the crowds at the business competitions I have attended on college campuses. The only negative is that the event was not open to the public, a big change from previous Intel business competitions I have attended for years in Berkeley, California. I suspect the reason is that this first year was an experiment for Intel, and they wanted to test things out before widening the audience base. I was invited by Intel, a company that has been very kind to me over the years. My last Internet startup was an Intel Capital portfolio company.

My favorite company is Pro Glove, out of Germany. This team won third place and USD $100,000 in the competition.

Pro Glove makes solutions to improve the accuracy and speed of production factory workers. The company says there are 200 million such workers in the world.

The company sells gloves, sensors and software to process the data returned by the globe embedded sensors. Factories apparently for the first time can see exactly what workers are doing with their hands. If a worker skips a production step, the software can spot the mistake and flash a light on the glove to warn the worker to go back and complete the step. The glove analytics software can even tell where the worker is standing in the factory, so if they are walking around needlessly to fetch tools, the manager can spot that an perhaps move the tools closer to the worker to save walking time.

Pro Glove said that for BMW, each second saved on a repetitive task making a car translates into USD $7,500 per year savings for BMW, so having analytics about hand movements of production workers strikes me as a must have. Pro Glove cited various return on investment periods for their different use scenarios. Sometimes the system is predicted to pay for itself in a year, and sometimes in just there months.

I can see Pro Glove gloves being a must have in leading edge factories, and I can see room for lots of follow on products that will have high margin, particularly for the software designed to analyze the glove data. I think a large and enduring business can be built, and that is why I give this team my highest vote.

My second favorite team is Open Bionics, out of the United Kingdom. This team won second place in the competition.

Open Bionics proposes to make low cost three dimensionally printed bionic hands for children. The team proposes a price of just USD $2,000, which apparently is shockingly low compared to current bionic hands, which they said can cost up to $100,000 each.

The Open Bionic model is not as durable or as functional as the models costing 50 times more, but the low cost allows families to fit their handless children with a bionic hand multiple times as needed as they grow up. Apparently insurance won’t pay for a new $100,000 bionic hand each year for a growing child, so handless kids just grow up without handless until they stop growing and can get a fully featured metal bionic hand. Open Bionics was not specific about how current costly models are paid for and how often they are replaced, thus I am reading between the lines a bit here in this paragraph.

The Open Bionic team proposes to keep the cost low by not having patients meet with any medical professionals. Instead, the company will send an Apple iPad brand computer tablet with a 3D scanning attachment to the patient by postal mail. The customer will scan their own arm stump and return the iPad to the company. The company then prints out and assembles a hand that will fit the exact stump dimensions of the patient, and the hand will just show up at the customer’s home by common carrier, to be self installed by the customer.

The hands don’t have  a wrist joint, but they can open and close by the wearer just thinking the same thoughts handed people think when they want to open or close their fist. There are electrode sensors that are taped to the forearm of the wearer, and the Open Bionic team had the electrodes on his own arm, and could make the bionic hand open and close just by his thoughts controlling his forearm muscles. It was an impressive demo.

I got to play with one of the bionic hands, and I could feel the hand squeezing my hand when activated by a push button ‘demo’ switch.

Open Bionics has the opportunity to dramatically improve the life of handless children. The price proposed frankly seems too low to keep the company afloat, so I worry about their viability. But the price can be adjusted, and since the team won USD $200,000 in this competition, they have some breathing room to figure out both their technology and the business.

My third favorite team is Nixie. This team won the grand prize in the competition — USD $500,000.

Nixie had the most eye popping video demonstration of their product.

Nixie proposes making a tiny drone helicopter that contains a still and video camera. The drone can fold up and wrap around a person’s wrist. With the flick of the wrist, the drone can be unfolded and then can start up and take flight away from the wearer. Once at a suitable elevation and distance, the camera can face the use and take a picture or start recording. Once done, the drone will fly back to the user and turn off.

Nixie sees itself as a competitor to Go Pro and similar action cameras. Eventually Nixie says they want to compete with normal point and shoot digital cameras.

I held a prototype Nixie drone in my hand, and it is cute. However, it looks impossibly fragile and totally unsuited to wearing while rock climbing, the stated first market Nixie envisions. I can see the drone simply falling off the wrist and falling on someones head below.

But I am happy Nixie won first place in this competition. The idea I think will wow many observers, and it will help brand the competition as one where really cool consumer products can be born and launched. That’s good for Intel and good for the competition.

But I think Nixie won by making the drone wearable as a way to be eligible to compete in this competition. In the absence of the competition, I think the product would have taken a different form. If I were rock climbing, I would want the drone in a protected case that I could easily open and access when the time was right for taking pictures.

Nixie is likely to be costly to start. I can see it costing USD $1,000 to early rock climbing adopters. I think they will find customers even at this price.

I don’t think there are strings attached to the Intel half million dollar prize, so I think that Nixie is welcome to ditch the wearable aspect in favor of practicality. I encourage them to go that route, even though it may secretly irritate Intel.

I admire Nixie for getting a non dilutive $500K to pursue their photography drone. This kind of thinking is the hallmark of successful entrepreneurs — tailoring an offering for the market at hand. Intel was the customer, and Nixie gave Intel a product it asked for. And Intel will be proud of Nixie even if they just become a successful photography drone company.

I can also imagine ways to make a Nixie both wearable and very unlikely to get damaged during arduous climbing. Just put it into a head mounted hard case inside a custom helmet. When the time comes, the helmet wearer could command the helmet to open and for the drone to take off from there. This could even be voice activated via a helmet mounted microphone.

Sadly, I don’t have time right now to finish this post. My grandmother is turning 103 years old December 12, 2014, and I have a project I have to finish by then as I promised her I would take it to show her. I have already spent three days on this Make it Wearable competition, and I need to get back to my regular life. I have a lot more pictures to post, and I want to tell you about the seven other companies, which also are very interesting.

I am dismayed with how the United States responded to four plane crashes 12 years ago this day, September 11, 2013.

Wars were started that still continue. Trillions of US dollars have been wasted destroying much more than just property and life.

How much better would the world be if President George W. Bush treated the September 11, 2001 events as regular police matters.

Osama bin Laden still could have been found and brought to trial to determine his guilt or innocence, and we wouldn’t have wrecked our good will like we have with these needless and counter productive wars that are a drain on the world. Constant war is a drain on the mental energy of everyone in the world, I fear.

President Bill Clinton handled the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing as a police matter, and I recall that some of the perpetrators were located, tried in civilian courts, convicted and punished. That’s the way to handle both daily criminal and infrequent catastrophic criminal events.

I believe the people behind the 9/11/01 attacks were upset with how the United States conducts itself on the world stage. I think a sane and proper response would have been to admit to the world that the United States does overstep its place more than it cares to admit. We should have attempted to open a rich and ongoing dialog with those who attacked us to solicit their advice on how the United States could tone things down in the future so that others wouldn’t be so hopping mad that they attack us.

Would such a polite and measured response have worked? I don’t know. But I think it would have cost less in every measure.

If a prestigious entity with world visibility were created where we would yearly sit with our attackers and those who think of attacking, we would have taken the wind out of the sails of our attackers to a substantial degree. The entity would need to have power, prestige and money for it to be seen as more than window dressing by those who might attack us. It would need to make sure action was taken after meetings so all those watching would know their voice was being heard and acted upon. This would be one heck of an organization, and I don’t know how to pull it off, but it needs to be built. We know how to build huge, costly organizations that can cause action. The US military is one such huge costly organization, for example. The organization for good I propose might need to rival the US military in size, scope, power and budget. That might sound crazy, but what really are we getting for our military expenditures now? I would argue a lot less than nothing. We are building negative equity like at no time in the history of the United States. We could fund the organization I propose by reallocating half the budget of the US military as a start. With just half its budget intact, the United States would still have a huge military, but we would also immediately have the largest organization for world change on the planet, and just by having made that commitment, I predict more than half our ‘need’ for a military at all would evaporate. Half of our military is still a lot, and think of the new friends we would make with the new organization for change I propose. Far fewer people would wish us harm if we were doing good on such an intense global scale.

Now prepare yourself for the most provocative text I’ve written in my life…

Soon after the September 11, 2001 plane crashes, United States of America President George W. Bush should have said something like this:

“The United States is profoundly sorry and embarrassed.

Without an invitation, the United States has been acting like the policeman of the world.

We recognize that there are other valid points of view on how to live life. We don’t want to be attacked like this again, so I ask those of you who wish us harm to please share with us how we can avoid such attacks. We are willing to make big changes, and we’re willing to spend a lot of money to be a nicer world citizen. To demonstrate our resolve to change and see the point of view of others, the United States today is contributing USD $100,000,000,000 to get the ball rolling towards a more fair and sane planet. We will spend to improve the lot of the people that attacked us.

On behalf of the United States of America, I am sorry that this country has acted such that you believe you had to attack it. While this country may not agree with your points of view, it does recognize that you view your points of view as valid and worth advancing. Clearly, we need to talk, and we will talk. I personally will talk face to face with your representatives.

The United States feels so strongly that it will learn to play nice on the world stage that beyond the USD $100 billion I just spoke of, I am committed to working with the US House and Senate to gain approval to spend up to USD $3,000,000,000,000 over the next decade to fix what’s wrong with the world.

The United States is not a vindictive nation.

The United States could respond by starting wars and destroying entire countries, but we’re bigger than that, and we will show our attackers that the people of the United States are your friends, not your enemies. War is terrible. Peace is golden. The United States stands for peace, not war.

On behalf of everyone in the United States, including the families of those who lost loved ones today, I appologize for our actions, attitudes and positions that led others to believe that they had to attack the United States so violently to get our attention.

With hard work and determination, today will be the last time that any people of the world should feel that they have to attack us to get us to change our overstepping ways.

The United States in fact is ashamed that it has come to this, that we have upset other people so dramatically and profoundly that they have responded by flying airplanes into our landmarks, ending the lives of so many earnest people in the process.

Let us spend the following ten minutes in silence to reflect on the enormity of the events of today. Let us imagine a world filled with peace, happiness and enough to eat and drink. Let us cast aside our revengeful impulses so that we can come together at a meeting table to plan how the people of the world shall overcome the horror of today in favor of the brightness of a more promising future for all of humanity.

To the friends and family of those who lost their lives today, if you want to be upset with somebody, be upset with me and the past Presidents of The United States of America. What happened today was a reaction to this country overstepping its place in the world. It simply is not nice to tell other people how to live while we consume such a disproportionate percentage of the resources of the planet. In the decades ahead, we will need to learn to share our bounty with others more than we have done so far. Look on this redistribution of wealth as your insurance payment for the future safety of you, your property and your loved ones, not as a handout. The United States has been acting like a rich, spoiled kid on the playground eating the finest candy and laughing while others nearby starve and have little. We can remain a wealthy and prosperous and happy nation while at the same time leveling the playing field. We are a nation of thoughtful and ingenious innovators, and if we put forth our full effort, perhaps 100 times greater than what was required to place a man on the moon, we can solve the really big problems the world today faces.

Three trillion dollars is a lot of money. We can spend that amount building peace, love and goodwill. We can also spend three trillion dollars killing hundreds of thousands of people and destroying countries.

I am certain that three trillion dollars of peace, love and goodwill is more valuable than three trillion dollars of rubble, hate and death.

May September 11, 2001 be viewed by history as the first day of the most kind and peaceful period the world has yet known.

For those of you that worship a higher power, may that higher power give you comfort on this historic day of new beginnings. Let us rejoice in the saved lives of the hundreds of thousands of people this nation will not kill in response to the events of today. Let us rejoice in the new lives of the hundreds of thousands of babies by coincidence born this historic day. It is tragic that the United States lost thousands of its residents today, but keep in mind more babies were born in the United States today than lives were lost in these four plane crashes.

The United States is your friend, not your enemy. The United States wants peace, prosperity and fairness for all the people of the world.

Tomorrow will be better.

I love you.”

Instead, President Bush said something genuinely and dramatically stupid:

“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists.”

This is such an unwise thing to say it sounds like something out of the mouth of a high school student at a third rate institution. Yet his short statement formed the basis for spending of even more trillions of dollars than I proposed the United States spend in my mock speech above.

The United States ruined itself by its unwise response to four plane crashes.

I don’t spend a lot of time delving into the deep details of world politics. I am not a historian. I am not particularly well informed about what I write about here. I admire Noam Chomsky and Dennis Kucinich. I think Chomsky and Kucinich would like what I have written here today. I hope to meet both men one day, perhaps in response to this post if I am really lucky.

I believe I possess a very fine and properly working moral compass. I am proud of and guard my moral compass. I’ve made profound and life altering changes in my life when needed to protect and guard and respect my moral compass, even when it would have been so easy for many others to compromise. Perhaps the above makes me look childish and unrealistic. Perhaps I will lose a friend or three by what I’ve written. But what I’ve written has been on my mind for ten years now, and today I decided to just say what I first thought starting about 2 seconds after I first heard about the first plane striking one of the towers of the World Trade Center complex in New York City, New York, USA.

The United States has ruined itself by its response to four plane crashes.

Why?

PS – I am sorry for the loss of the family and friends of those who lost their lives in the events of and following September 11, 2001. By writing this post, I do not intend to upset anyone who lost a loved one. My heart also goes out to friends and family of those who have been killed or injured in the response to the events of 9/11, including those serving in military forces on all sides. I love the United States, and I love people generally, from all countries. I am so sad that all this death and suffering and hate has happened. It’s all so unnecessary and wasteful. Thank you for reading. I love you.

Kevin Laurence Warnock
San Francisco, California USA September 11, 2012

Note: I published this post on September 11, 2011, the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Today, September 11, 2013, I published this post again, changing the first sentence from “I am dismayed with how the United States responded to four plane crashes 10 years ago this day” to “I am dismayed with how the United States responded to four plane crashes 12 years ago this day, September 11, 2013.”

I am proud of this post, and I plan to republish it annually on September 11th.

Cofounders of ShoppinPal.com - Sriram Subramanian, CEO, and Pulkit Singhal, CTO. July 26, 2013. Photograph taken at University of California Berkeley Skydeck accelerator, on the top floor of the tallest building in Berkeley, California. That clock tower in the background is on the UC Berkeley campus. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

Fermyon, Inc. is the company behind the impressive ShoppinPal smart phone application that improves the retail brick and mortar retail shopping experience for both buyers and sellers.

On Friday, July 26, 2013, I met with Sriram Subramanian, Chief Executive Officer, 34, and Pulkit Singhal, Chief Technical Officer, 29, the co-founders of Fermyon.

Retailers complain about people treating their physical stores as free showrooms for consumers to touch and evaluate items they will then actually buy online, frequently from giant Amazon. The retailer I suspect feels cheated by these people since they received something valuable, but didn’t make a purchase from the store to compensate the store for their efforts.

Consumers like mobile shopping apps like the one Amazon gives its customers. Smart phone shopping apps let people look up specifications and customer reviews to help them make smarter purchasing decisions. I don’t see shopping apps disappearing, since they offer such compelling value to consumers.

Retailers with physical stores could of course create their own smart phone applications that mimic those from huge online merchants, but it’s mostly larger chain stores that do, because writing a shopping application is difficult and costly.

That’s where ShoppinPal comes in.

ShoppinPal is a service that retailers pay money for — 3% of sales for retailers with over USD $5,000 in monthly ShoppinPal sales, or $49.00 + 3% of sales for retailers that sell less than $5,000 a month through ShoppinPal. This strikes me as assertive pricing, but if it works, Fermyon will be in a position arguably even better than Visa and Mastercard, because Fermyon is not taking any fraud or refusal to pay risk that I can see. On the other hand, no small retailer could hope to deploy a system like ShoppinPal by developing the system itself, and showrooming is a looming problem that likely is motivating retailers to take defensive action.

Shoppers use the service for free.

The retailer gets access to a custom branded application its customers can install on their own phones. In addition, the retailer gets access to an online management console that shows what customers are buying, among many other statistics. Since buyers provide their email address when they install the smart phone app, the store can easily send them custom messages.

ShoppinPal app display at Heartfelt gift store at 436 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA, August 1, 2013. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

For example, if a potential buyer uses the smart phone app to add several items to their ‘wish list’ the store will know about that and can gently remind the potential buyer to return to the store to buy the items. Buyers can be especially enticed to return by being sent discount codes that buyers can use to receive the items at a lower price. Buyers can even opt to have the items delivered to them, offering the convenience of online shopping to the offline world.

I like ShoppinPal. The small team of two co-founders and three staff have put together an offering that appears to come from a larger entity that has raised far more than the modest USD $120,000 in outside capital that Fermyon has taken in.

Buyer engagement potentially starts moments after walking through the door of a shop. One can ‘check in’ to the ShoppinPal app, like one ‘checks in’ on Facebook. The check in alerts store management that the buyer was present.

Next the customer can use the camera on their smart phone to scan the bar code on items they are interested in. The app recognizes the bar code and pulls up that product. The app can, at the option of the retailer, show customers recommendations for other items they may like in their store.

For new retailers, the ShoppinPal cloud based software taps into the retailers’ point of sale cash register system and reviews the receipts for the prior six months of sales. The software sees that people purchased certain items during the same transaction, and uses that set data to recommend that future purchasers also consider such grouped purchases.

CTO Singhal asked current retailers using their system to try the recommendation engine, and those queried marveled at how the recommendations matched with their memory of what many past customers had bought together.

The ShoppinPal app and the website are both beautiful – spare, elegant and clean. The management console is by Mixpanel, a separate company ShoppinPal pays to provide that service.

Sellers can add various incentives for shoppers to buy more items. For example, a discount can be applied after a certain number of purchases. Thus, a coffee shop could automate the ‘buy 10, get 1 free’ paper punch card that still is in use, and was in use at the tea shop where I met with Singhal and Subramanian.

That tea shop in fact allowed customers to store their paper cards in a physical file system on the counter out for the public to access. I marveled the tea shop would put such sensitive information out on public display, because a competitor could surreptitiously copy down a list of the shop’s best and most loyal customers. With quality video cameras in every smart phone, someone could just pretend they were looking for their card while capturing video of every card the thief perused. An electronic loyalty system like that included in ShoppinPal reduces the risk a customer list can fall into the hands of an outsider or an employee that should not have that information.

Inside ShoppinPal, there is not only a wish list, but a gift registry, which should encourage others to buy at a retailer the others may not even be aware of when the items are added to the registry.

ShoppinPal communicates via application programming interfaces to two point of sale cash register systems — Lightspeed Retail and Vend. ShoppinPal hands off to the cash register the precision task of calculating sales tax, sidestepping a thorny problem, since there are thousands of sales tax jurisdictions.

As a customer walks around a store, as they pick up items and place them in their physical shopping cart or basket, they can click ‘add to cart’ within the mobile app. This gives a running total of their planned purchases, and when the customer is ready to pay, they can buy directly from the app, which will display a receipt on screen the customer can show to store staff as they pass through the exit.

This pay within the app feature over time will let retailers hire fewer checkout clerks. The pay within the app feature can be turned off by the retailer that prefers customers visit a cash register to physically run their credit cards through a credit card terminal.

Whether the purchase is paid for in app or at a retailer’s register, the ShoppinPal management console keeps track of all the buyers’ purchases, and makes the purchase history available to the customer, which in my mind is a great perk for the customer. When I shop at Lowes and HomeDepot, I use their loyalty cards mostly because their systems email me a copy of my receipt within minutes after a purchase, which makes my life easier at income tax time.

The sexiest feature of the mobile app is a feature that adds fun to getting a discount. Instead of just writing out ‘you get a discount’ the app presents a silvery gray patch that looks just like the silvery patches covering the digits on lottery tickets. You have to ‘scratch off’ the patch with your finger, and as you rub the screen with your finger, the silvery ‘material’ under your finger vanishes. The effect was startlingly captivating such that I believe a tiny company could be formed just to advance this feature inside other unrelated products from other companies.

ShoppinPal is still an early stage venture. The company was incorporated in January, 2011, but work didn’t really accelerate until CEO Subramanian completed his MBA in June, 2012, last year.

Fermyon has signed up four customers, all via resellers that have agreed to carry their product. I view it as a positive sign that resellers are promoting their product while the company is still so young, for resellers have to be particularly careful to not damage their reputations.

Exterior of Heartfelt gift store at 436 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA, August 1, 2013. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

ShoppinPal’s customers are Harney & Sons in New York City, Heartfelt in San Francisco, Isha USA in Tennessee and Marthas Vineyard Glassworks in Massachussets, all in the United States. The Isha implementation is the most demanding, because the organization runs events that draw about 1,000 people twenty times or so per year, so the transaction volumes spike tremendously during events and subside the rest of the year.

Interior of Heartfelt gift store at 436 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA, August 1, 2013. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

I live in San Francisco, so I decided to install the ShoppinPal app on my Apple iPhone 5 and visit Fermyon’s customer Heartfelt, a charming and totally adorable gift shop in the Bernal Heights neighborhood. This single store business doesn’t sell items that people are likely to evaluate and then order online from a giant website. But the Heartfelt is the kind of place that I think could benefit from the loyalty, gift registry and wish list features in ShoppinPal. The store also I suspect prides itself on having just the right gift, as there appear to be over 10,000 different items for sale inside this small store. As I was browsing around, I found half a dozen items I wanted to buy, and I am not even looking for gifts right now.

Jewelry for sale at Heartfelt gift store at 436 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA, August 1, 2013. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

As soon as you check in, a horizontal red line starts sweeping up and down the phone display. The indicates the phone is looking for a bar code to recognize. I created a video of the ShoppinPal experience from checking in to just before payment. I have embedded the video into this post. The video is a bit shaky because I had to hold my large camera in one hand, and operate the app with my other hand, and since the phone was so close, the depth of field was shallow. But the video does show faithfully what the app does.

As soon as the app finds a bar code, it goes into search mode where it’s communicating with the cash register computer to find the item. This takes about two to six seconds. Then the item shows up in your shopping cart. From there it is confusing what to do next, since there is no ‘checkout’ or ‘buy now’ button. Instead, to continue shopping, you are to press the button in the upper left labeled ‘heartfelt,’ the name of the store. This should be labeled ‘back’ or ‘continue shopping.’ There is a button in the upper right called ‘cart.’ I didn’t try that button, but I assume that button takes you to the shopping cart from where one can checkout.

Textiles for sale at Heartfelt gift store at 436 Cortland Avenue, San Francisco, California, USA, August 1, 2013. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

I scratched off the panel as invited, and I got a 10% discount. I was given the chance to pay via credit card or PayPal, the payment service from auction giant EBay. I bought a lightweight wallet made from Tyvek, and I paid via PayPal. The process was quick and efficient, but my receipt listed my discount as $0.00 even though the 10% discount had been correctly applied to the total. I understand that ShoppinPal was only recently installed at Heartfelt, so I expect there to be small glitches to be worked out. For such an early stage yet ambitious application, ShoppinPal performed well.

As you might imagine, ShoppinPal has big dreams and has had sales meetings with huge brands that are household names throughout the US. I suspect that after they build their credibility with smaller retailers for the following months that they will land a national retailer.

ShoppinPal participated in 2012 in the Silicon Valley Bank Seed Showcase, a pitch event to investors for Silicon Valley Bank clients. Silicon Valley Bank is widely considered one of the most important banks in Silicon Valley for startups that aspire to or have raised venture capital investment. You can watch CEO Subramanian pitch on stage and then watch him later that day be interviewed by Carrie Walsh, Managing Director II, ESG, Silicon Valley Bank.

I could find no direct competitors to Fermyon.

The closest offering appears to be CardFree, which automates via a smart phone app some of the tasks that ShoppinPal automates, like payment and loyalty. But CardFree omits the ability to scan the barcode of products to bring up specifications and Amazon.com like product recommendations, two of the most compelling features of ShoppinPal, in my mind.

Another company that does part of what ShoppinPal does is CardStar from Constant Contact. CardStar appears to be a smart phone app just for storing and using loyalty cards from multiple retailers, so your physical wallet doesn’t burst from storing too many physical cards, like mine is threatening to do.

Another loyalty card company is BellyCard, which appears to be similar to CardStar.

Finally, there is a smart phone payment app called AisleBuyer, which lets in store purchasers pay via their smart phone. This company was acquired by Intuit in 2012.

See what former CNET Editor at Large Rafe Neeleman had to say about ShoppinPal in 2012.

The company’s name Fermyon is a play on the particle physics term Fermion. The definition of the Fermion is better left to the article on Wikipedia I just referenced.

I took the picture of Subramanian and Singhal that accompanies this post with my Canon 5D Mark II camera, my Canon 50mm f:2.5 macro lens and my Paul C. Buff Einstein studio flash unit.

The location of the photograph is the Skydeck accelerator run by University of California Berkeley. Jeff Burton is the Executive Director of Skydeck, and Burton encourages me to write about the UC Berkeley affiliated companies that the accelerator houses in its exceptionally glorious 10,000+ square feet of penthouse office space. If you look out the window in the center of the picture, you will see the clock tower that serves as the focal point of the UC Berkeley campus. ShoppinPal is headquartered at Skydeck, but this is not an indicator that the team is reckless with its finances. To the contrary, it’s an indicator that the team is careful with its money since the company’s office space is provided for free by the University of California, from where Subramanian earned his Masters of Business Administration graduate degree. Skydeck gives free office space to only the companies it deems most likely to succeed.

I became aware of Subramanian over the last year because we both attend monthly Cal Founders meetings, which are designed to help founders and mentors be more successful in business. Subramanian and I are more acquaintances than friends since we’ve only met and spoken a handful of times. He learned of this blog and asked if I would write about his venture, and I agreed because I had become intrigued when he had introduced his company during the roundtable discussions at Cal Founders meetings. I disclose the circumstances of how we met to deflect any appearance of bias due to my already knowing Subramanian.

All motorized vehicles, including cars, boats, ships, trucks, buses, planes and trains should come equipped from the factory with integrated carbon monoxide and smoke detectors.

Vehicles should contain carbon monoxide and smoke detectors because power trains can fail and sometimes deliver deadly carbon monoxide into the passenger compartment, killing everyone inside. This happened yesterday, April 1, 2013, when three men got stuck in some mud while driving their sports utility vehicle in the early morning dark. One of the passengers, Shain Gandee, was famous for his starring role in the Music Television reality show Buckwild. The coroner ruled the deaths accidental and declared carbon monoxide poisoning to be the cause of death. The mud reportedly covered the muffler of the truck. That may have forced exhaust through holes in the exhaust system underneath the passenger area, and perhaps some of that exhaust infiltrated into the cabin. The truck was an old model that looks like it’s had a rough life.

It was probably cold and dark out, and I can see the three wanting to stay inside with the motor running to stay warm until daylight. Had there been a carbon monoxide detector on board, the three would have been warned of the danger they were in, and could have shut off the engine and stepped outside for some fresh air. Better to be cold than dead.

Even electric vehicles should have smoke and carbon monoxide detectors, since batteries also are dangerous. Additionally, people might use propane heaters inside, and they emit carbon monoxide that can kill you when they are malfunctioning.

Detectors should be hard wired to the vehicle start battery, but should have 10 year on board battery backup as well, like all detectors should. Detector design should be standardized so a detector from a Rolls Royce Phantom will fit a Chevrolet Aveo, and vice versa. That way the cost to replace detectors at the end of their life will be low enough that people will be inclined to do so. There should be an interlock so the car won’t drive past 55 miles per hour unless a working and non expired detector is installed. This will more than gently nudge owners to replace expired or defective detectors. A red light on the dash is not sufficient reminder. Making the car not start is too extreme, since a user might be in danger if they got stranded. A speed limit is a powerful incentive.

A detector like I propose here should cost about USD $10.00 in quantity with the standardization I propose. I am sure Gandee’s family would have loved for him to have had a detector.

In the meantime, before my idea gets implemented on a universal scale, go buy a home style smoke and carbon monoxide detector and install it in your vehicle. If it goes off and saves  your life, please tell me so in a comment so I know that people are reading this and acting upon my advice.

I don’t know how many unintentional carbon monoxide poisonings inside vehicles occur each year, but the number must be in the hundreds worldwide. An extra $10 to avoid these deaths is worth it.

Jeff Clavier, left, August 30, 2012, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum at University of California Berkeley

I have learned that smoke and fire detectors almost always signal low battery condition in the early morning between midnight and five o’clock. This wakes me up and forces me to replace batteries when I am sleepy. I suspect many people don’t have spare batteries always on hand like I do, and simply take the batteries out until they can go to the store. This leaves the premises less well protected, and I suspect fires have started during this period and that people have died.

The fix is so simple I can’t believe I only thought of it today.

Simply include a clock in all battery operated smoke, fire and carbon monoxide detectors. Have this clock powered by its own battery that can last a decade or more. Set this clock at the factory for the part of the world where the detectors will be sold. The low battery circuitry should consult this on board clock, and should suppress the chirping ‘low battery’ notification during typical sleeping hours, say from 10pm to 8am. The chirping can resume at 8am each day until the batteries are replaced. Alarms typically will chirp for months before they run out of power entirely, so the delay in chirping during the night will not cause a significant safety issue.

The clock should be user resettable so the detector can be moved between time zones by the buyer, or set to accommodate unusual sleep schedules.

I suspect the clock I am proposing costs no more than USD $.50 in bulk, and the feature that it will enable can be promoted to boost sales. I suspect such a detector will sell well because I suspect everyone with a detector has been awakened by their chirping.

Chirping during waking hours is likely to be a measurable advance in fire and poisoning safety, since awake and alert people are less likely to make mistakes, like removing the batteries or putting in replacement batteries backwards.

Jeff Clavier's Facebook Wall as of March 22, 2013

While the circuit designers are at it, they should program the detectors to keep track of the passing years and notify the user when the detector has reached its end of life, around ten years after manufacture. I am sure there are millions of ‘expired’ detectors still in use because people forget when to replace them.

This is my second post on how to improve detectors. My first post Smoke detectors should send activation warnings via text messages via Wi-Fi I wrote July 23, 2011.

I believe detectors chirp now early in the morning because batteries deliver less power when cold, and in many homes the temperature drops lowest early in the morning. Here’s a post by The San Diego Real Estate Inspection Company that agrees with me.

Thank you to SoftTech VC venture capitalist Jeff Clavier for sparking my imagination today to think up this fix. Clavier asked on Facebook this morning why detectors report low batteries exclusively at 3:30am. It’s then that I thought of including an internal clock to solve the problem. I posted my suggestion in a comment on Clavier’s Facebook Wall, and then decided to write this post to formalize my suggestion, with the hope the idea gets discovered and implemented.

If this idea makes money for you or your company, please send me an industry average royalty for using this, out of the goodness of your heart. I am guessing that will amount to about USD $.05 per detector, but that could result in my getting ever more wealthy over time given every residence on Earth should have multiple detectors forever. Thank you!

I will not patent this so it’s now in the public domain if it hasn’t already been patented, which is not unlikely given how simple the idea is. I could quickly find no mention of this idea after performing a Google search for this idea.

I wrote about Jeff Clavier last year, and I took the picture of him that accompanies this post. Clavier speaks colorfully. My favorite quote from when I saw him speak August 30, 2012?

“I passed on airbnb that some showed me when it was called air bed and breakfast and I said ‘air bed and breakfast… are you f—ing kidding me?”

My preference is that the world move quickly towards hard wired sealed detectors that have backup batteries that will last ten years. It also seems that non hard wired detectors should have solar cells like calculators and watches, to keep the batteries from having to drain themselves so quickly.

My clock idea I present here is still relevant to such detectors, since I would prefer to learn the detector needs replacing while I am awake and likely to buy a new one at once.