Kevin Warnock

My brother and his family come to San Francisco every other Christmas to spend the holidays at my parent’s house, which is not far from my house. My brother and his wife have two great kids, a girl and a boy. This year the kids got a cool Lego set unlike any I’ve seen first hand. I know these sets have been around for years now, but I’ve never seen a set in use before.

Today’s Lego are inspiring kids to be inventors like never before. The set Andrew’s kids got has proximity sensors and inclination sensors, and motors that are powered from the USB socket on a PC or Mac computer. The sensors and motors are read and controlled by software that runs on the attached computer. The software let users program the Lego so that it actually does something.

In this video, Andrew helps his kids make use of the software, using a propeller plane I helped put together. I didn’t need to help though as the directions were very clear, and contained zero words… just drawings. It was all really quite impressive. I would have loved to have a set like this as a kid. In fact, I’d love to have a set like this now. Santa, are you reading my blog?

Along with my wife Monika and my brother and his family, I went to the beach today at Redeo Cove in Mt. Tamalpais State Park just North of San Francisco over the Golden Gate Bridge. It was windy and chilly… so windy there is not much audio worth hearing on the video, as the wind was just whipping past the microphone of my camera.

The surf was pretty active, and we all kept our distance from the water. But the real fun on the beach was the makeshift all natural teeter-totter we discovered. Since teeter-totters have mostly been removed from playgrounds, I haven’t been on one in a very long time. These all organic models we rode today were even better than commercial models because even multiple adults could ride simultaneously.

Rochelle, who my brother and his wife have known since they were all undergraduate students in Washington, also joined us with her husband Henry and their inquisitive and well behaved young son.

Before we went to the beach, we toured the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, a short drive from the beach. This center has a hands on kids area where children can learn about marine mammals. The center is partly solar powered, and the installed panels provided shade to the recovering patients. The center is essentially a hospital for sick or injured sea mammals.

Sunset on Redeo Cove beach

My wife Monika and I went to my parents’ house at 8:30 this morning to open presents. My brother and his family flew in from their home in Colorado, which they do every other year. My grandmother Elsie Battaglia lives in Portland, Oregon and is 98 years old, so she no longer visits at the holidays. However, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, she participated in the present opening via video conference using iChat on my brother’s MacBook computer. We set the laptop up on the coffee table by the Christmas tree, and she was able to ‘be there.’

This sounds like it might be awkward or impersonal, but it wasn’t at all. The kids seemed to really like showing off each new gift they received by holding it up close to the camera. Grandma’s live-in helper Claudia would describe the goings on on screen to Grandma, who has lost much of her sight in recent years to macular degeneration. Both Claudia and Grandma really seemed to enjoy the experience. Grandma bought a 24″ iMac about a year ago specifically for video conferencing with her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, so this wasn’t the first time she’s done conferencing. But it was the first time she joined in opening presents Christmas morning around the tree.

I set up my video camera on a tripod and let it record a segment. I think it turned out great because you can see Grandma on the laptop and you can see everyone interacting with her almost as if she were sitting on the couch in person. I heartily recommend you try this at home with your loved ones that can’t travel for important events. It was really a special day today.

Monika and Kevin, Christmas picture, 2009, San Francisco, California

This Christmas my wife Monika and I sent out Christmas cards with an enclosed picture. This picture turned out to be one of the nicest pictures we have of the two of us together. Monika bought me my first set of pajamas with feet since I was a child. She got a set for herself as well. These pajamas keep us warm on cold San Francisco winter nights. Monika had an 11 x 14″ print of this shot made, framed it and we gave it to her grandfather Imre, Sr. for Christmas. This picture was taken in my house in front of our Christmas tree. Monika’s smile is just beautiful.

I just read a great article on how to increase sales at software companies.

Find what’s blocking sales with under a day of work

This is from the blog of Jason Cohen, a software entrepreneur in Austin, Texas.

Intel sponsors another significant event annually, the Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge. This year, the two events overlapped. The Intel Capital CEO Summit was November 16-18, and the Entrepreneurship Challenge was November 17-19.

I don’t have anything to do with the Entrepreneurship Challenge, but I was invited to the dinner on the 18th. Sadly, I had to miss it since I was still in Huntington Beach at the Summit. However, I was able to attend the Challenge final event tonight, the 19th, at the Haas School of Business at University of California at Berkeley.

The Entrepreneurship Challenge is a business plan competition for teams from all over the world. The semi-finalists and finalists presented their plans tonight in a public forum, and the four winning teams received cash prizes totaling $45,000.00.

I love business plan competitions. I’ve been a judge in the Haas Business Plan Competition for over five years. Generally, the judging day is the most exciting day of the year for me. It’s exciting because I get to meet some of the smartest and most enthusiastic people in the world.

The semi-finalists received 30 seconds each to deliver their ‘elevator pitches’. The finalists received about 10 minutes each. The finalist presentations were outstanding, but I did not capture them on video for this blog, as I consider them to be somewhat confidential. Yes, they presented in a public forum, but I don’t think the teams would want the presentations to be posted to the Internet. I did capture the elevator pitches on video for this blog, however, as they were so brief that I think sharing them online is not likely to harm the companies.

As you can see in the clip above, the ideas are quite varied, and are of high quality.

The winners of the competition were all non-US based teams. One team was from China, one was from Germany and one was from Singapore. The team from China won two prizes, the first place prize and the audience awarded prize for favorite team.

The winners were:

1st prize and people’s choice: iHeath Group
2nd prize: CaptchAd
3rd prize: Zimplistic

Here are the descriptions of the winning companies from the event’s website (EntrepreneurshipChallenge.org):

Ihealth – Tsinghua University, P.R. China

Ihealth Group aims to improve life quality with its revolutionary new product—MPHB biodegradable bone screws. Ihealth has developed MPHB bone screw in light of bionics which has been granted a national patent in China. Our product overcomes the disadvantages of the existing materials and provides a nearly perfect solution for the rehabilitation and fixation of bone injuries.

CaptchaAd – Technical University Munich, Germany

The CaptchaAd GmbH is the world’s first company to combine enhanced SPAM protection with interactive video advertising and thus increase the security on websites and facilitates visitor’s use, while at the same time ensuring a more conscious perception of advertising by the user. Instead of distorted codes conventional CAPTCHAs (an anti SPAM function used more than 250 million times a day worldwide) use to differentiate between humans and machines, CaptchaAd (Captcha Advertising) uses questions concerning the content of the spot. A CaptchaAd is a short commercial including a question which can easily be read and answered by site customers to substitute the “normal” CAPTCHA process. This results in a higher level of attention and involvement by the user to the viewed content.

Zimplistic – National University of Singapore, Singapore

Roti is staple diet of 800 million Indians eating 2.4 billion rotis everyday. Making rotis is a very time consuming, tedious and skillful task and since there is no fully automatic home appliance that makes rotis, people resort to unhealthy and expensive alternatives like frozen rotis. Zimplistic is a Singapore based startup that has designed & developed the first ever, fully automatic “Rotimatic”. It is like a coffee machine. It is the size of a mini microwave oven, the user just has to enter no. of rotis, and it measures, kneads, flattens, roasts and puffs rotis out.

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.

One of the most helpful features of the Intel Capital CEO Summit is the formal matchmaking between Portfolio Company CEOs and industry executives. The matchmaking is set up in a large ballroom. There are about 100 tables for two. A senior representative from such companies as BMW, Disney and Walmart is sitting at each table. The portfolio company CEOs are matched via a web application ahead of time. At the matchmaking event, each Portfolio Company CEO gets a private one-on-one meeting with five industry executives. This year I was matched with BMW, Agco Corporation, Corent Technology, Capgemini and NEUSoft Group International. One of these meetings was very good, and there was a direct match in interests, so I consider the matchmaking a valuable success.

There is a lot of energy in the room during the matchmaking meetings. Here’s a short video clip I shot showing the activity.

I saw three dimensional television for the first time tonight. It’s a remarkably captivating experience. I don’t know if it will ever take off, but it sure made an impression on the audience at the Intel Capital CEO Summit today in Huntington Beach, CA.

Here is a video I shot of a 3D television camera. It looks very expensive, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The flat panel TV in the video costs $8,500.00. When you put on the 3D glasses, look at the flat panel, and move your hand toward the TV camera, it looks to you like your hand is coming out of the TV screen. It’s stunning.

For the second year, I got to meet MC Hammer at the Intel Capital CEO Summit. MC wasn’t performing this year, like he did last year. But he was actively asking questions and meeting people. He grilled Sprint CEO Dan Hesse about Sprint’s plans for WiMax 4G broadband wireless service. MC sat at my table at dinner tonight after one of my table mates invited him to sit with us. At the end of dinner, I asked MC if I could have a picture with him, and he agreed. MC is particularly interested in website metrics and analytics, judging from the questions I heard him asking.

MC Hammer and Kevin Warnock at Intel Capital CEO Summit, 2009