Kevin Warnock

I just got home from the Intel Capital CEO Summit in Southern California. Intel puts on such a compelling event for its Portfolio Companies.

Kevin Warnock at Intel Capital CEO Summit 2009

I met some really interesting CEOs.

Jeff Liesendahl of Accertify, LLC (Accertify.com) in Illinois runs a fascinating company that helps online merchants avoid selling to customers that are using stolen credit card numbers. He has some crazy stories of fraud well beyond anything I have read about. I won’t post the stories here since he might not appreciate my repeating them in a public forum. But one story I can share as he said it hit the newspapers. He said there are criminal gangs that create fake profiles on eHarmony, looking for targets to defraud. One such profile showed a hunk of a man that advertised himself as a widowed engineer. It turns out he was a scammer living in Nigeria. He pursued a woman he met on eHarmony for nine months, and they got engaged without ever having met in person. eHarmony discovered the gang, and their security staff contacted the woman and told her this man was a criminal and that she must break off contact with him. The woman did not take heed, and said they must have made a mistake, as she was planning to marry this man. The man later convinced the woman to sell her house and wire him $160,000.00. Once she did that, she never heard from him again. What a story.

Jeff’s company has an apparently very solid business, as they seek to compile the same type of fraud detection databases the credit card companies maintain. These databases are used to detect fraud in progress by looking for unusual activity. What many people do not know is that the credit card companies don’t share their databases with online merchants, as they have no financial incentive to do so, as the merchants are 100% responsible for fraud. Jeff said online credit card fraud is a $100,000,000,000.00 per year problem, and the card companies want no part of that liability. Merchants have a very strong motivation to buy his company’s products and services.

Gail Kantor of eJamming (eJamming.com) also has a company I think is fascinating. eJamming allows musicians to play music together live over the Internet, no matter the location of each musician. They have spent five years perfecting their peer-to-peer software that, among other things, moderates the effect of different latency values that different Internet connections have.

Jens Nikolaj Aertebjerg, CEO of NeuString (neustring.com), has a company that makes predictive analytics software for the telecommunications industry. They promise to provide customers with a return on investment in just two months, the shortest ROI time frame I’ve ever heard of.

Finally, I got to meet Human Ramezani, in the IT Innovation area at BMW Group. I got to tell him my wish list for car features, and he graciously promised to pass them on to the right people at BMW.

Briefly, I would like to see ‘TiVo for radio’ where the car radio would record my favorite National Public Radio shows so I could listen to them no matter what time of day I am driving.

I would also like to see a system that would phone rescue personnel if a baby is left in a parked car. He said this one should be easy for them to implement since there is already a motion sensor inside the passenger compartment for break in detection. I suggested the car first phone and text message the owner, and if there is no quick response, the car would then call rescue personnel.

Finally, I would like to see motor vehicles cool themselves while parked in hot climates. This could be done with a small solar panel in the sun roof directly connected to a fan. The fan need not be connected to the vehicle battery, to avoid any danger of the fan draining the battery. The fan would only activate when there’s enough sun to power it, so there is no need for a power switch. I suspect a fair amount of oil is used in the world to cool hot car interiors just after starting. If the car interior were close to the outside air temperature, drivers wouldn’t have to run the air conditioner on high for the first minutes, thus saving fuel.

About two months ago I came up with the following idea to lower mobile phone bills.

In the United States it’s common to select a cell phone rate plan based on the number of ‘anytime minutes’ which are typically weekday daytime minutes. If you go over your allocation, the extra minutes are quite costly, and one can rack up a really big bill of hundreds of dollars if one is not careful.

Many carriers in the US offer free mobile-to-mobile minutes, where callers on that carrier can call all other mobile phones on that carrier without using up anytime minutes.

My idea is to modify a mobile phone so that it can be connected to an unmetered conventional or VOIP phone line. The phone could be programmed to answer calls, give the caller a dial tone so they could type a phone number and then dial that number over the landline or VOIP phone line. Once the called party picks up, the calls would be conferenced together, and the mobile caller could talk with the remote party for free forever, no matter the day or time of week.

Think of this as similar to a calling card, but with a cap on the charges. For example, a Vonage line is $24.95 a month and an extra mobile phone line through AT&T is $9.95 a month, plus taxes and service charges, for a total of about $20 a month. So, for $44.95, one could have unlimited anytime minutes on a cell phone. The carriers charge much more, about $99.95 a month per phone, without the taxes and charges included. Those charges probably push the total to $125 a month.

The cost savings of my idea are even more substantial if a family has several phones, as one modified phone could serve multiple phones out in the world. If the modified phone is busy, the caller can hang up and dial directly, using up plan anytime minutes. But a lot of the time, the modified phone would be available to cut minute usage.

The called parties would see the caller ID value of the conventional or VOIP phone line, not the number of the phone in the hands of the caller. This might be an advantage, since conventional and VOIP lines support name display as well as number display. There might be a software solution to this issue, to optionally allow the originating cell number to carry through to the called party instead.

This cell phone arbitrage might be possible with just a software application on a fully open phone platform. I could see software being written that would answer calls only from pre-programmed numbers, and then use a VOIP application on the same phone to place the outbound call. If the phone is left at home or at the office where there is WiFi, the VOIP call can go out over the WiFi connection.

I suspect there are no mobile phone platforms out there today that are open enough to permit this. It just seems unlikely an application can be written to answer the phone automatically and verify the user is authorized before placing an outbound call. But I suspect there are development cell phone platforms available that are fully programmable. I would imagine these being used by companies for example building home automation systems where the homeowner might want to call in to turn on the air conditioner via the mobile network.

Mobile carriers could block my arbitrage idea by requiring phones to be moved regularly. If they sensed one phone was being used in one place all the time, they could discontinue free mobile-to-mobile minutes for that phone, ruining the cost advantage.

The rate arbitrage works for receiving calls as well. Just ask your contacts to call the conventional or VOIP number instead of your actual cell number. The modified phone could be programmed to answer inbound calls from the conventional or VOIP line and then dial your cell phone out in the world using the modified cell phone to carry the call. Then, when you pick up, the two calls are conferenced together. If the modified phone is in use, the inbound call goes straight to voicemail. Sadly, I see no way for call waiting to be implemented, unfortunately, unless two modified cell phones were used. Then the second modified phone could be used to place another call to you in the world, and the call waiting feature on that phone would activate and you could toggle the two calls. The two modified phones could collaborate via WiFi with each other.

The advantage to running most calls in and out of a conventional or VOIP line is that that line can also be used conventionally when one is near that line physically. It could be a normal home or office line.

I like this rate arbitrage idea, but I have no plans to pursue it. I don’t know enough about phones to attempt it, and I think this idea will have a lifespan measured in just a few years. I think all mobile phones are headed towards unlimited pricing that’s affordable. Once that happens, there will be less reason to work with extra phones. However, I would like to see a discussion develop about this idea, and I’m open to working on this idea if it can be shown to be long lived.

On November 9, 2009 a driver of a large freight truck plunged off the roadway of the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge and died. According to news reports, he was driving ten miles over the posted speed limit. There has been discussion in the media about how to slow drivers down before they get to the tricky new S curve on the bridge, which was installed recently as part of the big project to replace the bridge with a more earthquake resistant version.

I thought of an idea that might help slow people down a lot.

Many bridge commuters carry so-called FasTrac electronic toll passes. These passes charge the users’ accounts when they pass through a toll booth.

My idea is to put sets of FasTrac sensors on the section of the bridge where the speed limit is reduced due to the S curve.

The first sensor would capture the ID of the FasTrac device. The second sensor would capture the ID and calculate how long it had been since that same ID had been captured by the first sensor. If the time interval was short enough to prove speeding, the account holder would be charged a speeding fine immediately and the device would beep to tell the user their account had been hit. A sign on the bridge could advertise the size of the potential fine to discourage speeding. The fine could increase each time the account holder violated the speed limit. An email copy of each FasTrac speeding ticket could be sent to the account holder to further prod drivers to slow down.

My idea does not require extra police patrols, and would help slow drivers down at all hours. The tragic truck accident happened around 3 in the morning, when few police patrols are practical.

While my idea may raise legal issues, I think it has the chance to save lives at relatively low cost. It would certainly get a lot of publicity as people debate the idea of immediate fines the driver learns about instantly. In Europe I understand that traffic cameras identify speeders, but the drivers learn about their infractions days later by postal mail. I think if a driver knows they will definitely get a ticket every time they speed on the bridge, their speed will drop dramatically and with more assurance than any other method I’ve heard of.

Yes, drivers can put their FasTrac device in a special bag to avoid detection, but the act of taking the device off of the windshield and hiding it may be enough to remind drivers they could fly off the bridge if they drive too fast.

I see empty seats even at sold out concerts. Technology can be used to fill these empty seats without inconveniencing ticket holders that might arrive well after the event has begun.

Once an event is sold out, tickets could still be sold. Maybe they might be called standby tickets. Many tickets now have barcodes on them and are scanned upon entry to the venue. With bar coded tickets, the venue’s computer system knows at any given moment which seats have people assigned to them that are present in the building.

If all regular ticket holders haven’t arrived by the start of the event, then standby ticket holders would be granted admission. Each standby holder would just approach the door and their ticket would be scanned just as if they had an assigned seat. The venue’s computer would then assign an empty seat to that person and send the seat assignment by text message. The ticket holder would then go to that seat.

If the person originally assigned to that seat arrives, the venue’s computer would pick another seat that was still empty and send a second text message to the standby ticket holder. They would then move to the new seat before the original ticket holder for that seat would have time to walk to their seat. Thus, there would be no awkward confrontation at the seat.

If necessary, the standby ticket holder may have to move multiple times if lots of people arrive late. If it were to turn out that all of the original ticket holders eventually arrive, then the venue’s computer would refund the ticket price and message the standby ticket holder that they would have to leave the venue, but that they had gotten to see the show so far for free.

The venue would be able to study historical data to figure out how many standby tickets to sell to minimize the chance a standby holder would be forced to leave a show in progress.

The standby tickets could be priced differently, probably lower, but perhaps the same or higher, as people desperate to see a sold out show may be willing to put up with some inconvenience for the chance to see a show they would otherwise miss.

I have been thinking about venue seat overbooking for maybe ten years, usually only while I am at a venue thinking about how much money is not being made due to the empty seats. The first iteration of the idea involved pagers that the venue would loan standby ticker holders. The pagers would have displayed the seat assignment. But now that everyone carries a mobile phone, the pagers are not needed and the idea becomes simpler and cheaper. With today’s smartphones, the standby holder could even receive a map showing directions to their new seat.

I like this idea very much, as it’s just software and there is real money to be earned by its use.