Saket Vora

After seeing Melih last week, I wanted to revisit Tokbox and used an hour long video chat with Sapana in Chicago and Mom/Sachi in NC to do it. Video quality is getting better, and long duration calls are having almost no technical glitches. The new UI is sleeker, easier to navigate and use.

But what really impressed me was the ability to bring up SlideShare documents, at least PowerPoints, and interact with them during the video conference call. SlideShare is a service that let’s you upload documents and share them with people in a very very simple way. Check out an example of me sharing a slidedeck with the call:

In addition to sharing a PowerPoint, you can even share a YouTube video (though when I used it the YouTube video part was a little sluggish).

A quick overview of why Tokbox is something you should check out:

• entirely browser based — no programs to download, install, configure.
• no account needed to join a video conference call. You can send someone a URL and they can jump right in even if they’ve never been to Tokbox before.
• The video conference can support up to ~20 people. I have never had enough people online at once willing to try a stress test of this, but that’s pretty neat.
• You can very easily send ‘video mails’ to people (even those without a Tokbox account!). I wasn’t sure about how useful this was until I actually got one. It actually felt pretty good to actually see the person and listen to what they had to say. I’m gonna start trying this more.

And to anyone looking to get a new laptop —  pay the extra $$ to get an integrated webcam. Stuff like this is only going to get more ubiquitious and popular and having one integrated is sooooo much more convenient and easier than using an external webcam.

Keep it up Tokbox!

At the same time as these two green/cleantech conferences we going on, the main attraction for the City was the Game Developer’s Conference, the largest gathering of game industry professionals and independents on the planet. I’ve known about the GDC for a while now through my friend Mike, who has attended three of them in the past. Helped by the growth of the industry and the decline of E3, the GDC has really expanded and the 5 day conference is packed full of technical tutorials, issue summits, discussions about business practices and industry trends, and showcases where people can reveal the innovations they are working on.

One of Amit’s friends was an exhibitor for NASA (he’s working for NASA developing their social media) and got us tickets to an afterparty on Wednesday night and then Expo Floor passes which we capitalized on for Thursday after the ThinkGreen conference ended. At the afterparty, I told him how much of spaceflight dork I am. He asked if I could name all the astronauts who walked on the moon. “Just the ones who walked on the moon or all of Apollo?” For my troubles I got  a sweet NASA pin. ;)

One area was entirely dedicated to the indies (the heroes!), a sizable amount for schools and countries hawking themselves (spoke to the guy from Wake Tech), and then of course some of the big names. Word on the street was that companies had really scaled back this year — didn’t have the same crazy feel like last year. I went by Havok’s display at Intel’s booth where Tim showed us what the the crazy physics engine could do. Mike came by and walked around with us for a while too. Some interesting things:

• Ambient peripherals. You can get tiny desk fans, desk lights, and rumble keyboard wristpad that can be activated as you are playing a game to help make the ambient environment match what’s going on.
• Ultra-compact, low cost real time motion capture kits
• An ultra-sonic based Wii-like remote for the Xbox 360
• Neurosky’s brain-wave powered control device
• PS3’s 3D glasses enabled games

A lot of focus on new ways of game interaction. After the expo hours wrapped we wanted to go get a bite to eat. A lot of places shut down in the financial district, but we got some Chinese food before we made our way to the uber metrocool W hotel’s lounge for an afterparty. Exhausted after 3 days with very little sleep and facing a packed Friday, I left soon after to catch the Caltrain home.

Really memorable and exciting 3 days in the City, that’s for sure!

After grabbing a few hours of sleep, Amit and I were on the 7am train to attend the ThinkGreen forum held by ThinkEquity at the swanky Intercontinental Hotel in the City. In contrast to the Green:Net conference we attended yesterday, ThinkGreen was a more mature and upscale event — lots of C-level (CEO, CFO, COO, etc) speakers from companies that are major players in the cleantech field.  The crowd was largely analysts, investors, and other professionals — of the 150 or so attendees, I counted around 10 students.

Still, the conference was really good. Clear, well moderated tracks such as the Solar Value Chain, Advanced Lighting, Future of Fuels, Resource Optimization (focus on water management), Smart Grid, Beyond Silicon for Solar, Policy Initiatives, Batteries, and Wind power. It was a good chance to learn about the key challenges and issues these companies are facing, largely from a market and business standpoint.

Lots of talk about how the economic downtown and the stimulus package is affecting the businesses. Many speakers commented at how this new administration is a really big help for green initiatives and renewables, unlike the last one. Some people/companies I also knew that I was looking forward to: Kevin Surace of Serious Materials and Don Young of Aspen Aerogels. I had read a HBS case study on Aspen Aerogels for my entrepreneurial finance company, and it was neat to actually meet the guy the case was about. Young in person was really great — Amit and I came up to him after his talk to learn more about the aerogel material. Even though a line was after us and we were lowly students, he took time to talk to us and pulled some samples out of his bag and showed us the products they are currently installing. Really enjoyed meeting him.

Between sessions there was a chance to network. Amit and I bonded with the crowd that skewed younger — the business school students and newly minted analysts or associates from VC firms. Surprisingly, water purification popped up as did WaterPLUS (it never goes away!). An associate at Sequoia pointed me to Crystal IS, a semiconductor firm making germical UV-LEDs out of alumnium nitride. Also, a contact from Crosslink Capital also mentioned that one of his analyst colleagues did his B.S. in EE/CPE at NC State, and a MS in EE at Stanford. Interesting path!

The lunch keynote speaker was Mark Mills, a physicist who had experience in government (an advisor to the Reagan admnistration), author, and a venture capitalist. What a great speaker! I will write a separate followup to him, but check out a Daily Show appearance he did. Get this — halfway through his talk he was explaining the physical nature of entropy and how it affects the way you should view energy to a room full of investors, analysts, and business executives. It was great.

Overall I’m very pleased I attended, and I must thank Amit again for scoring the passes. It was very upscale – warm breakfast (like the fancy buffet styles), three course lunch, and a cocktail hour with topshelf spirits and really good food. During an intersession break the 2nd day, they had someone blending fruit smoothies for us. :)

Whew! Great day at the Green:Net conference (where IT meets energy) at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio. Got to talk with the really cool Wattbot folks (they won the judges award during the launchpad!), see and hear from so many other people I’ve been following online. I’ll write a fuller report of it later.

Afterward my friend Ben was kind and gave us a lift to Market St. where we met up with my buddy Tim, Melih, and Mikey (VP Marketing at Tokbox). We took the bus over to Godzilla Sushi and had a great dinner there, made better by having everyone get to know each other more.

We stopped briefly at Tim’s place in the Mission — what an awesome apartment! — before finally catching the last lonely train back down to Palo Alto.

Gotta be up in 3.5 hours — the ThinkGreen conference in SF is next. Check out that line up…wow. The GDC is going on so I’ll swing by the Moscone center and check out the action there too.

After strolling the Farmer’s Market (mmmmm, fresh warm naan) in the morning, Mike, Amit, and I headed up 280-N to the Golden Gate Bridge. Weather in the Bay Area can be highly volatile — you trust short-term weather reports far less here, especially as you travel through the micro-climates which seem to occur every 15 miles you go up the peninsula. Anyway — it looked like the weather in Marin was going to clear up and since Mike was checking into his hotel at 7th & Market that afternoon anyway, we decided it an opportune time to check out the Marin Headlands.

Marin County is just across the Golden Gate Bridge and offers great views of the bay and the City.

Check out some of the views:

Terrell has a practice of taking a shot of him ‘leaping’ at all these places around the world — I saw him take one of leaping over Half Dome at Yosemite last summer. I quickly recognized an opportunity here, and we got the following:

Hehehe. Another family saw what we were doing and since I was already lying on the ground anyway, their two daughters tried a leap as well.

Afterward we walked a bit on the bridge a bit. The wind wasn’t even as bad as I thought.

We headed to the Good Hotel where Mike checked in. This hotel really pushes green and sustainability and positive sociatal impact. The lobby had a real One-Laptop-Per-Child device — first time I’d actually seen one. The UI was pretty confusing, but was sorta impressed they had a ‘Measure’ app with a lightweight frequency spectrum plot of the mic input.

Tim, the ‘04 Park who I went to Yosemite with last summer, was still at work getting ready for GDC, and we met up and had a coffee in the financial district near the Havok offices. He’s taking some intensive Japanese courses on the weekends. Afterward Amit and I headed to the Mission District and found a Vietnamese restaurant for pho, which was great (first time having pho). The area was surprisingly quiet, but I had a feeling that the buzz was closer to 21st Street.

After returning to Stanford, we watched Tropic Thunder, which was really, really, funny. Robert Downey Jr. was superb.  Another pretty nice day for spring break — now for a bit of work these next few days.

Last Friday, Donny bounded off the train in Palo Alto and I finally got to see him after nearly 2 years! I could tell he was excited to be in the Bay Area — one of the first thing he told me was that he was surprised at how big it was. Nearly two hours to go from Berkeley to Palo Alto! Donny had spent the last day and a half in Berkeley visiting the school during its civil engineering department’s open house. Berkeley is one of the schools that accepted Donny for graduate school, along with MIT, Georgia Tech, University of Texas @ Austin, and Purdue. He had visited Georgia Tech and Texas earlier, and Berkeley definitely offered something new.

We had a bit to eat at the Coupa Cafe then headed down to SJC to pick Mike up. Mike was arriving early for the Game Developer’s Conference taking place next week at Moscone West in San Francisco. This would be I think Mike’s 4th GDC. We headed back up 101 towards the Googleplex!  Ben, an ‘02 Park, invited me over and it was an opportune time for Donny to catch up with his old friend Ed from New Jersey, who was at Stanford for his M.S. before joining Google just a week ago. I had visited the Googleplex during the EEP trip in ‘07, but it’s always such a neat place to visit.

After the three of us got back to the Farm, we went out on a walking tour of campus. This gave us plenty of time to talk and catch up , and Amit joined us too.

We did a long circuit through the campus, swinging by the coffee shop at the Clark Center where fellow Park classmate Mary stopped by too.

By this point, it was too late to make a trip up to SF, and our plans to do a sunset Big Dish hike were thwarted by early closing times. So we did the next best thing: head over to the Old Pro for drinks and March Madness college basketball. And what madness it was – two OT games! We hit up an Indian restaurant down the street for a quick but filling meal afterward.

Donny was leaving at 8am from SFO the next day, so we called it an early night. This was a little tough with a raging party going on in the courtyard outside. Mike and I continued to talk until 2:30 or 3. Groggily, we drove up to SFO and bid goodbye. After getting some more shut-eye, we headed to Prolific Oven for a late lunch, coffee, and to get some work done. A return to Old Pro was in order to catch the afternoon basketball game, but alas no upsets.

In the evening we synced up with Amit for a late dinner at Tofu House, a Korean restaurant in Palo Alto. It’s kinda sad, but even though i’ve known Mike since 10th grade of high school, I can’t say I’ve ever had a real Korean meal before. And man I’ve been missing out!

See the title? That’s why I’d rather be at Stanford instead of any other prestigious school in the northeast. It’s because when you walk out of a final exam that mercilessly annhilates you, you step into the shining sun, feel its warmth, chat with your friends, and you realize that life isn’t so bad after all.

No amount of studying could have helped for that ‘thermodynamical accounting’ class that is labeled as a fuel cell course. It’s over though.

And my bracket is busted already. But you know, tomorrow I get to see two of my best friends, so I’m all smiles.

Grid Integration of Renewables finished Monday afternoon — it was more or less straightforward with a few twists, but I think I did fine.

That afternoon I did a phone interview with 42U — a company out in Boulder, CO for a role of energy efficiency research analyst/consultant. What really impresses me is how seriously this company takes social responsibility – they truly walk the walk when it comes to being responsible citizens and why tackling the energy crisis is so important — all the way from the CEO on down. And plus, their careers page has an Office spoof done by the employees. Hehe, gotta love the style.

Tuesday night was Energy Efficiency in Buildings, which went fine. Open book, open notes meant people were taking their time making sure things were correct. Again, a few twists but not too bad. What really made it interesting was what happened 10 minutes before the final started. I was nearing the end of my bike ride and turning into the sand lot where all the bicycle stands outside Bldg. 200 were when back wheel suddenly disagreed vehemently with me applying the brake during a slight turn. The bike skidded out beneath me and I took a dive forward. Hands were alright, but my jeans were ripped at the right knee and quarter-sized part of the knee was open and bleeding. FUN! Walking past the girl on her cell phone who saw it happen 20 feet away but didn’t do or say anything to me, I cleaned it up in the bathroom as best I could and then took the final.

2.5 hours later I’m back home and made a late dinner. Outside, some grad students from across the courtyard were bowling on the sidewalk. Yes, with a 10lb bowling ball and 10 real pins. One of them had the large wooden picnic tables on its side serving as a backstop. It was nuts. Even from across the courtyard in my far back room, it sounded just like a bowling alley….never a dull moment.  Amit came over to talk about the BUILD judging he did that night (more on that later) and we talked about the NCAA bracket and lamented one more about the sorry state of NC State sports. There’s always next year.

Last up is my fuel cell exam on Thursday, which is guaranteed to be awful.

Naman was town this past weekend and it was so nice having him here. He was in true vacation mode — brought a bit of work but mostly it was just to take a break from medical school. He stayed over at Nader’s place which was helpful cause it helped him get a better handle of what Nader was up to and how he was doing.

The flight got in late and we ended up just picking up some snacks at the grocery store and eating a bit at home before taking an evening stroll around campus. Walking and talking. Saturday morning he went down to San Jose to see his uncle while I finished up a short report, picked some spring courses, and baked some apple pie from scratch (it was Pie Day! 3/14!) before heading over to Menlo Park to have dinner with the Williards and Eltings (ie, Matt and Mary). I’ve said this before but I can’t help but say it again — they are so nice and generous. It never ceases to amaze me. It was great catching up with Grant and seeing what he’s up to, and of course Mrs. Williard’s jaw-dropping cooking. Every meal is like a gourmet experience! I humbly offered my pie and it actually turned out to be quite good. I just picked the simplest recipe on the internet….and for once in my life timed the baking perfectly. I mixed and matched my apple filling, opting for braeburn, granny smith, and a golden delicious. The from-scratch crust helped too.

I swung by Nader and Naman in the evening and we planned an early morning hike up to the Big Dish but when I called them at 8:30am  they were already finished. Miscommunication on the timing. Anyway, we strolled through the farmer’s market enjoying the samples, coffee, and fresh samosas before spending a few hours doing work at the Old Union. Naman and I then drove up to San Francisco to meet up with our friend Andrew. Since there were friends visiting the area, he invited folks to his place for some tea, snacks, and dinner. What a delightful evening — their apartment just off Twin Peaks and Noe Valley is cozy with clean white walls, richly diverse bookshelves, naturally lit, and when we entered had strains of Sigur Ros wafting throughout. Andrew had some fresh bread in the oven — the chemical deliberate nature of it appeals to him — we discussed banana bread and cooking as a creative outlet. Andrew had a friend from Duke who is currently studying IP law at Columbia, Anjan (whom I met earlier — former McKinsey colleague who is currently writing a book), as well as Zan from Andrew’s time at Google.

It’s one of those long meandering conversations that you feel tired but good from — like a satisfying run…only mentally. If that makes any sense. I’ll stop with the analogy here.

Naman headed off on the red eye Monday night. Let’s see if I can return the favor and drop in on him while he’s out near Bhutan this summer on the frontlines of the fight against malaria.

UPDATE: When this was first posted, I didn’t stress what a help my teammate Ljubi has been. Without his dedication and work ethic, our film for Hindi would have never been made. Ljubi worked on editing this video for 24 hours straight with no sleep, then went back to the video room with Amit and I after our screening and stayed another few hours before finally going home. He’s the one who also supplied the great cameras we used. A big tip of the hat to him.

It’s been a while. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday was particularly fun. Did the Hindi final exam on Tuesday night, wrapped up  short filming segment for the movie, then spent the night writing my report for grid integration. It went well – got a good result. On Wednesday night I met with the social-e team to figure out which teams advance to the 2nd round…it was a tough 3 hour session.

Check out the semi-finalists here.

I met up with Ljubi and Amit who were in the ‘video cave’ working on the Hindi film. Got there around 9:30pm and left at 5:30am. Ljubi had already been at it for 12+ hours. My solar home teammates came over at 10am and we finished our passive solar home project, report, and turned it in. I had a great time working with them.

I jetted over back to the video cave and we hit the ‘render’ button at 5pm…hoping it’d finish in time for class. We got a version of of the movie halfway through class, but it was 320×240 square. Ugh. We shot this nearly 1080i resolution! We showed it anyway and the response was great. After class Amit, Ljubi, and I went back to the video cave to continue making fixes. Amit and I left at 2:30am.

We want to fix some more things before hitting ‘render’ for the last time. We are having difficulty on two key aspects: a) audio cleaning. We have wind noise, airplane noise, etc in several scenes. I’m not comfortable operating in the audio space as I am in the video space, so it’s going to be a challenge to clean that out; and b) determining which export setting will give us what we want. This is an absolute nightmare. We have source footage in one format. We have our Final Cut Pro project settings to be a certain video format, pixel aspect ratio, etc. And we have the various outfile file formats, compression settings, etc to choose when we render the video. We just want the output to appear HD widescreen, but so many times it comes out as a square image when we open in Quicktime. Understanding this video file format mess is something I’ve struggled with before, but now it’s exacerbated because I’m working with HD footage for the first time…intended to be shown widescreen. If anyone has any pointers or people I can talk to, please let me know.

Apologies for the mini-rant, but this explains why you won’t see an upload for another 3 weeks. I want to get a HD high quality version and upload that to Vimeo so you can enjoy this in HD.

Naman is arriving in the ‘Yay Area’ tonight! I’m having dinner with the Williards and Eltings tomorrow night, and then maybe a potluck dinner with Naman, Andrew, and others up in SF.

I should probably find some time to study for finals in between all that….yeah.

After getting shorted an hour of sleep due to daylight savings, I woke up on little sleep to meet with nearly the whole Hindi class (7 others) to begin filming our project. We first shot at the Schwab center (the MBA residence..it was admit weekend…now those guys have sweet gigs, wow), and then in the woods next to Lake Lagunita. It took the whole day…started at 10am and wrapped at 6pm. Instead of sitting behind a desk all weekend, I got to be outside which was great. Went afterward for a drink at Mihir’s place and discovered he’s a beer connoisseur – he has 80+ different kinds of beer in his apartment! It was a nice day – making our hindi class friendships even stronger.

3.5 more days…