Kevin Warnock

Robert Reich delivering speech 'Class Warfare in America' on Sproul Hall steps at UC Berkeley during Occupy CAL protest on November 15, 2011

I attended the Occupy Cal protest at University of California at Berkeley last evening, November 15, 2011. There were over 1,000 protesters there, including many approaching retirement age that indicated by a show of hands that they had earlier been there protesting in the 1960s and 1970s. It was an electrifying event that I will cover in detail in another blog post.

The event was made more thrilling by a speech given by Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at Cal. Cal is an abbreviation for University of California at Berkeley, for my readers unfamiliar with the word. The definition of Cal is well known locally, but on the world stage UC Berkeley is better known.

Reich was United States Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Reich is also a frequent commentator on NPR (formerly National Public Radio) in the United States. NPR is my favorite radio station, and I’ve heard Reich speak many times on the air. Last night was the first time I’ve seen him speak.

I brought my tripod and set up my Canon 5D Mark II camera with two of the legs touching one of the Occupy Cal camping tents that had earlier been set up before the steps of Sproul Hall at Sproul Plaza. This was  a fantastic vantage point because the tent was already blocking the view of those sitting behind it, so my tripod didn’t appreciably further block the view. I simply sat on the pavement while the camera recorded. I recorded the full speech, and you can watch it in the video below. This is a compressed upload, but I have the full 7 gigabyte file in full HD. If you need the file for some project, please contact me.

Reich’s talk was very well received by the audience, including the tent dwellers sitting right next to me who graciously allowed me to set up there.

It was an inspiring and powerful speech. I am not going to try to summarize it since it’s brief and presented here in its entirety. I encourage you to watch it all the way through, and share it with your social network. I was so taken with it that I stayed up late into the morning editing and compressing the video so I could get this posted today during the day.

Haas School of Business at University of California at Berkeley, November 10, 2011

Poster for Intel Global Challenge 2011

Third place winner of Intel Global Challenge, 2011

Gaitu.com team, which won the 2011 Intel Global Challenge

Yesterday evening, November 10, 2011, the 7th annual Intel Global Challenge final presentations were held in the Anderson Auditorium at the Haas School of Business on the University of California at Berkeley campus.

I took dozens of pictures, and I plan to write an extensive blog post later today. It’s 1:11 on 11/11/11 right now and I’m tired. But I’m posting a few highlights now to get something out. I’ll come back and fill out this post after I get some sleep.

Pillow Talk ring (photo from www.littleriot.co.uk)

Here’s a pair of gadgets that will warm your heart.

Romantic partners use Pillow Talk communication rings when they’re apart from each other overnight. The goal is to make the partners feel more tightly connected to each other.

Here’s the description from the inventor’s website:

Pillow Talk is a project aiming to connect long distance lovers. Each person has a pillow for their bed and a ring sensor which they wear to sleep at night. The sensor wirelessly communicates with the other person’s pillow; when one person goes to bed, their lover’s pillow begins to glow softly to indicate their presence. Placing your head on the pillow allows you to hear the real-time heartbeat of your loved one. The result is an intimate interaction between two lovers, regardless of the distance between them.

Reading about this product brought tears to my eyes it’s so simple and sweet. I wish I had thought of this. It’s a genuinely thoughtful use of technology to improve the human condition. Here’s the promotional video. Warning: you may cry when watching this! I did.

I have a big improvement for this pair of devices:

Make the pillows talk. After all, the product is called Pillow Talk, not Pillow Heartbeat.

Since voice consumes so little bandwidth, and Skype-to-Skype calls are free and may be of unlimited duration, I suggest the pillows be outfitted with speakers and microphones that stay on all night, so the other partner can hear the other breath. If the lovebirds want to talk, they can just start talking.

This ‘always on’ connectivity might take some getting used to, but I think such a system would for some become a must have product that they would miss terribly if it were taken away. The pull on the heart strings would be so powerful once a couple got used to ‘sleeping with their sweetie remotely’ that they wouldn’t want to give up the experience.

When I was a teenager, the father of one of my next door neighbors died without warning of a brain annurism. My mother was good friends with the mother whose husband had just died. My mother told me how much her friend told her that she missed hearing her husband snore. That story was so sad to me back then, and it still made me cry as I wrote this piece, years later. I was a teenager when this happened.

There is something so powerful about just sleeping beside your mate. It’s so intimate and irreplaceable and special.

A true pillow talk system with heartbeat, breathing and two way voice could be one Valentines ‘technology gift’ that would be loved by both men and women.

I recommend that such a product be initially built as a USB pillowcase that would plug into a power brick that plugs into the wall. Inside the brick would be a small computer running Linux plus a WiFi transceiver that would connect to the home or hotel’s WiFi connection. This way a computer would not need to be by the bed and batteries would not need to be charged. It would also keep the radio frequency part of the system away from the heads of the sleepers, probably a good thing since some people might use such a system for months or years at a time, particularly when you consider military personnel away from home for long periods of time.

If Apple starts making what I just described, they should call it iSleep! They could make an iPhone charging cord that splits off in two wires: one to the power brick and one to the pillow. An iPhone certainly has all the computing power necessary, and many people already sleep with their phones.

I have too many projects to do in life, so if you like this, build it and pay me the industry mean royalty for similar ideas. Let me know when it launches!

One more joke: This is a true peer to peer system! P2P or ‘pillow to pillow’ lol…

Networking hour at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum held at Google, Inc., October 27, 2011

Thursday October 27, 2011, I attended the first Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum ever held away from the University of California at Berkeley campus.

The Forum was held in Building 40 at Google, Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California USA. Getting to the event was a challenge because Google was throwing a huge celebration for the Indian national holiday Diwali. As a result, parking was tight and there were hundreds of people in the huge courtyard between the massive Google buildings. I’m not complaining for it was festive and an adventure. I photographed the 6,000 burning candles artfully arranged in the courtyard, as you can see at the bottom of this post. There was a live band. The Google cafeteria was packed. It was exciting.

The Entrepreneurs Forum was a small event compared to the outdoor Diwali celebration.

The title of the Forum was ‘Power Hungry: Developments in Energy-Efficiency Technologies for Data Centers.’ This was an appropriate event to have at Google, which I suspect runs the largest collection of computers in the world.

I learned a lot at this forum. For example, computer rooms that are chilly are computer rooms that are horribly inefficient. Modern servers can run fine at temperatures around 85F degrees, and sometimes even warmer. Here’s the official video, immediately above.

Dale Sartor, John Robison and Joyce Dickerson on panel at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Dale Sartor, P.E., Applications Team - Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

John H. Robison, Principal, NGEN Partners, LLC, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Joyce Dickerson, Sustainable IT at Stanford University, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Sylvia Burks, Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Diwali Festival of Lights with 6,000 candles at Google, Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California, October 27, 2011. Photograph by Kevin Warnock.

[Note: I received a free pass to this event courtesy of my membership on the Advisory Council for the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum. I am writing here as a private citizen, not in any official capacity with UC Berkeley or the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum.]

Today I was depositing some rent checks at San Francisco Fire Credit Union, where I conduct my personal and business financial affairs. I was impressed that there was a line formed in the lobby by people opening accounts.

There was a folding table set up with clipboards holding account applications. Every seat in the lobby was taken with future customers filling out the paperwork.

I overheard a staff member offering bottled water to people while they waited. I was so pleased that Bank Transfer Day is still delivering results, two days after the actual day.

The only thing I would do differently would be to offer guests tap water served in reusable glassware, since bottled water is a product I don’t approve of except for true emergencies. Perhaps they don’t know Ikea sells durable drinking glasses for USD $.59 each. If they kept a few dozen in the back, they would never need to offer bottled water again, even on busy days like today. I bet they already have a dishwasher in the lunchroom, so they can wash these glasses easily. Since a bottle of water costs about half the price of an Ikea glass that will last for years, it makes no financial sense to stock bottled water.

I am a huge fan of the San Francisco Fire Credit Union. It’s simply the best financial institution I’ve ever dealt with.

San Francisco Fire Credit Union is the Apple, Inc. of financial institutions — it’s that good.

Just this week I needed to have a document notarized. SF Fire Credit Union provides notary services to its members (customers) free of charge. Marguerite was the notary that helped me with this. It probably took half an hour of her time, and so we were able to talk a bit. She’s worked there for six years. This was hard to believe because she looked to be about 25 years old, but maybe she started when she was 18 or 19? Marguerite displayed zero annoyance at my interupting her regular duties in the back office. In fact, I would even say she was sweet — a feat given that notary work seems to be a thankless job. I’ll say thank you though. Thank You Marguerite!

I’ve had notary work done elsewhere, and often there is an attitude you pick up that you are bothering them. I don’t know where my credit union finds its employees, but they do a universally good job. Even when I asked to talk with a mortgage specialist about refinancing my mortgage at today’s low rates, I was ushered right into the back to meet with a very smart specialist who devised a plan in minutes.

Not long after I met CEO Darren Herrmann at their annual breakfast for members, I sent him a message via a comment box on the front page of their website. Amazingly, he called me on the phone 15 minutes later to thank me for my message. I’ve relayed that story here before, but it’s such a good story and since today is Bank Transfer Day, I thought I’d share the story again.