Kyle Fleming is an iOS developer at Live Nation Labs where he’s working to redefine Live Nation’s mobile offering. He previously co-founded Rexly, a social music player for the iPhone.

Kyle and his team, Eyes on Demand, won the robotics track of MEGA Startup Weekend in April. He spoke with me about his MEGA experience, and startup success.

AS: How did you hear about MEGA Startup Weekend?

KF: I heard about it from my roommate at the time, Peter Watts (created +Music and Swarm.fm). He won 2 previous music hackathons and highly recommended Startup Weekend, so I thought that was a pretty strong signal that I should go. When I was signing up, I decided to do something completely different and chose the robotics track. I haven’t done any hardware hacking since college, since I live almost entirely in the software realm at my startup. I was really glad I did, too, since it’s helped rekindle my love for electronics.

AS: You won the robotics track of MEGA Startup Weekend: what did you build and why?

KF: When I got to the event Friday night, all I could remember was Peter telling me that whatever I do, I must pitch an idea. I showed up by myself, so I didn’t actually know anyone there. I just started introducing myself to people, brainstorming on ideas of cool stuff to build, and listening to what people had built in their spare time. One of the folks I met there, Matt Garten, (who later joined my team) was telling me about a sonar system he had build that calculates the distance of the nearest object in front of the attachment. My Mom, Kathy Fleming, is blind, so I thought it would be an interesting tool for her to use; however, at the time I thought of it more as a cool hack and less as a business.

When the time came to finally present our 60 second pitches in front of the room of 80, I hadn’t come up with a business idea yet. So, (with Matt’s permission) I threw an iPhone into the mix, added a story about my Mom, and presented to the room the idea of a sonar attachment to the iPhone that lets blind people “hear” what’s in front of them using the change in pitch. My intention of finding someone else’s group to join immediately afterwards. To my surprise, a good dozen or so people came up to me and wanted to help me build it. I gathered up as many different skills as I could find and our team ended up being around 8, which was probably the largest.

Over the next 12 hours, I tried to employ all the techniques I remember my cofounder, Joel Resnicow, using over the past year of Rexly’s existence (our iphone app music startup). We brainstormed a lot and made sure to talk to actual potential users of our product. It evolved from a cool hack into an actual service, which we codenamed Eyes On Demand. We gave it a tagline of “OnStar for the Blind.”

The prototype was an iPhone with a sonar sensor attached to a bracelet. A blind user would press a button that would connect them to a remote operator. The operator could see and hear everything the user could, and would walk the user through whatever problem they had as if it were a phone call to some omniscient personal assistant. When it came time to present what we had built, it was pretty obvious to us that our whole project was story-driven, with my Mom at the core. I must say, it made for a pretty convincing presentation.

AS: What has the response been to this business, post event?

KF: Afterwards we were invited to present at DEMO with a few students’ alpha projects. We talked to a bunch of people who were excited to follow our progress and had lots of helpful insight. We even had an angel investor express explicit interest in investing. I think there’s a lot of real potential here; however, given most of had our own jobs to focus on, the project has slowly moved its way onto the backburner. In the future, I imagine there’s a possibility for one or more of us to pick back up where we left off.

AS: What part of Startup Weekend did you love the most?

KF: My favorite part was definitely the first time we tested the prototype. We had cobbled together a 50% solution by Saturday evening (presentations were on Sunday), and we went back to the main room where a bunch of the other groups were. We gave a random volunteer a blindfold and started testing the limits of our technology. First, we guided them through navigation and nervously laughed as we accidentally ran them into tables and walls on several occasions. Then, we tested to see if we could guide them through serving themselves a meal, which went surprisingly well.

On a whim, we decided it would be fun to see if we could draw a picture, vicariously, through the blind-folded volunteer. Miraculously, it actually semi-worked! At that point, we had attracted a pretty big crowd and were starting to see the tweets flowing in. In triumph, we took the childish drawing of a landscape scene and taped it to the wall in the cafeteria for all to see.

From that point on, we felt this sort of other-worldly drive that compelled us forward. It was sort of an excited social do-good feeling mixed with the feeling you get when you’re overwhelmingly proud of something you create. I imagine this is what being a parent feels like. The end result was that we worked 2x faster and 10x more creatively.

AS: Where do you see robotics in the next year? Next 5 years?

KF: Robotics as a whole is an interesting topic. I’m really excited to see some of the possibilities around search and rescue with quadcopters, as well as human limb replacement. I’m not close to that research so it’s hard for me to judge timelines. Since I mostly focus on consumer-facing applications and not scientific research, I tend to take concepts straight out of science fiction and try to see how they can fit into everyday life. I like to imagine the path we can take to achieve the singularity sooner.

My most recent train of thought (and I’m trying to make this happen in the next 5 years) is around ubiquitous biometrics and wearable environment-measuring devices. Basically, I want to turn people into cyborgs to make them healthier, happier, and more productive. I think the best way to do this is to give them the tools to be more cognizant of their bodies and minds and how they are being affected by the world around them.

AS: You also have another startup, Rexly – tell us about that company and what’s happening with it.

KF: Rexly has actually just been acquired by Live Nation. The deal was in process at the time of the hackathon, but it wasn’t finalized until just now, so I’m excited to be telling you about it! (Read more about it here: http://gigaom.com/2012/07/16/live-nation-labs-buys-rexly-opens-s-f-office/)

Live Nation Labs is a new group within Live Nation tasked with redefining their online presence. Our team and the folks running Labs got really excited about the synergy between a user’s music player and their concert experience. Rexly was brought on to focus on the mobile side of things, using our music player as the first of many in a constellation of interconnected apps. Joel and I giggle at the thought of remaking a 6,500-person company’s entire suite of mobile apps. It’s certainly going to be challenging.

As you can probably tell from my answers, I’m incredibly excited about the future in whatever form it takes. I love how events like Startup Weekend bring us all together to make incredible things. Of course, that’s just the beginning and that’s when the real fun begins.

Congratulations, Kyle and the Rexly team from all of us here at Startup Weekend Bay Area!

Rexly Twitter

Rexly on iTunes

Matt Oguz comes from a professional background in ecommerce, analytics, behavioral economics and decision sciences. Earlier in his career, he built big data solutions for a number of Fortune 500 companies such as Dow Corning, Coca Cola and General Electric. Matt started CostCaptain.com in 2005, a leading ecommerce company that caters to the education buyers from K12 to Universities. In 2006, Matt wrote a negotiation management software platform for car dealerships and licensed out to leading dealership chains. In 2008, he built an independent stock rating platform that extracts large buy and sell transactions of mutual funds and calculates stock ratings based on this information. Having invested as an angel investor since 2005, Matt started Istanta Capital in 2012, an emerging fund that focuses on early stage startups.

Istanta is offering $25K in seed investment to a MEGA Startup Weekend Winner, and Matt answered some questions about their investment:
 
AS: How did you hear about MEGA Startup Weekend?

MO: Industry news.

AS: What made you want to get involved with Startup Weekend?

MO: This was my first time attending the event. I was amazed by the breadth and depth of the startups there vs. other hackathons. The entrepreneurs in all three categories seemed serious about turning their ideas into startups then to real businesses. We are in talks with more than one team already.

AS: Have you/Istanta made a similar offer at any other Startup Weekend event?

MO: This is a rare offer, but yes, we have offered something similar at two other events, including Stanford’s eBootcamp 2012, in which we were the only fund that offered seed stage funding.

AS: Who have you chosen to reward?

MO: The robotics winner team, Eyes on Demand – an on-demand remote human assistance, conceived for visually impaired people.

The last 7 days were a complete whirlwind of entrepreneurship, team building, game design, mentorship, networking, emotional highs, and of course, no sleep. What began with my friend, Jonathan Fung, coaxing me to cancel my flight home and instead participate in Startup Weekend, ended with one of the best entrepreneurial experiences/exercises I’ve had in my life. What was most different about this one than all the others was the level of camaraderie and synergy that we had amongst our team. It’s great to work with people that work as hard as you do and care just as much about the success of a project/company/idea. In this post I hope to take you through the roller coaster that was the last 7 days and some of my lessons learned.

Startup Weekend (SW):

SW is a 54-hour event where developers, artists, entrepreneurs and marketers combine their talents to pitch ideas for startup companies, form teams around those ideas, build prototypes/demos, and finally pitch it as a business on Sunday evening. Our event was called MEGA Startup Weekend because of the 120 cities they host the event in, this one was the biggest. Over 300 people signed up for 3 different verticals: Gaming, Mobile, and Robotics. Even despite how cool it sounds I can honestly say I had no idea what to expect going in. And I would not have signed up if my friends hadn’t pushed me. I’m going to go into a lot of detail about each step of the whole process so if it gets a little dry, feel free to skip to the next section.

The first day of the event was Friday which is where we all divided up into our verticals and got the opportunity to pitch an idea to try and build a team. In the gaming vertical there were probably over 30 game ideas pitched ranging from a Code Battle (learn to code by battling against your friends), Bet on anything with friends, Pirate Booty (pirate game with a mario type view), Productivity games, Zombie game (a  play on zombie games where instead you are the zombies attacking the people) and an Eskimo game (kinda like angry birds but multiplayer and you launch eskimos instead of birds). Nathan, my roommate, pitched an idea for apples-to-apples on the phone which didn’t get any fan fare. And my idea for a game similar to Joust which featured music instead of visuals also got voted out. When it came time for everyone to form teams around the winning ideas, there were many which I was interested in trying, but none really jumped out as being amazing. Charles, a guy whose idea also got voted out, approached Nathan about developing the apples-to-apples idea. I soon joined and we began to work through the idea. We soon realized we needed more development help so we began looking for any developers that hadn’t yet been taken. Fortunately we were able to poach our fourth and final teammate, Nikola, from another team. The founding team was now born!

We quickly got to work figuring out what we wanted to get done in next 48 hours. After all, we had to create a business/vision, build an app, and pitch it by Sunday evening. We began looking at each our skill sets and strengths to divide up tasks. Charles had a computer science degree from Berkeley and tons of coding experience so he was our lead developer / product manager. Nikola had a computer engineer with back-end experience so he was to build the architecture and back-end of the game. Nathan had experience in IT consulting and a background in finance so he was the project manager. I had experience building my own web design/marketing company so I took a business and UI/UX/design role. After we decided on roles it was now time to actually get started!

On Saturday we showed up nice and early to get started. Charles even brought an extra monitor to help boost productivity. To do mockups/wireframes of our app I used balsamiq which was an easy way to create designs/frame for the developers and designers to use in collaboration. Charles began pounding away at coding the android app and Nikola started on the back-end. Nathan began to plan our the pitch and started collaborating with mentors. We kept pounding away every hour and to my amazement, we made significant progress.

It wasn’t until Saturday afternoon that I realized what we had was pretty special. Not only did we have a pretty cool idea, but our team had more synergy than any I had worked on before. We all knew our roles and we since we were all working so hard at them, it seemed like things were getting done very quickly. I finished the wireframes and design elements (buttons, backgrounds) and built our website by the end of the afternoon. Charles had most of the front-end functionality done by the evening. And we had received amazing advice from probably a dozen or so mentors that came by our table. Almost all the mentors had direct experience in building games, investing in games, or some other computer/gaming field. Those small tidbits of advice we got early on Saturday were no doubt essential parts of our eventual success. One of the mentors Adeo Ressi, advised us on some monetization strategies based on consumables/power-ups and also on making sure that we all dressed up as a team. Tony Parisi, Scott Foe, and Aaron Cammarata helped to work through our business model, go-to-market strategy, and presentation form.

Despite all of our hard work we were still no where near finished by the time they kicked us our of the Microsoft Campus at midnight. We decided to keep coding away at Charles’s place and it wasn’t till 5am that we were finally able to get the app working and get some much needed sleep.

By Sunday we came onto the Campus looking more like zombies than people. Nathan’s contacts were glued to his eyes and I was growing a beard. But alas, this was the final stretch. As the day went on our team began to realize that while our game was awesome, it was still not quite awesome enough to win. It needed a bigger vision/idea. It needed a business and a company behind it. It wasn’t till we started preparing to do our pitch that Charles came up with the game changer. The platform on top of the game. A vision for a new way of photo sharing. Completely unexplored.

Then came time to actually pitch. There were about 15 teams in our category and 5 judges with experience building gaming companies and investing in them. Nathan and Charles led the pitch and I led the demo of the app. Overall it went off very well and the judges couldn’t poke any large holes into our plan, given that we’d only had 48 hours to work it. When it came time to announce the winners our team had a very strong feeling that we had a chance to win. So I got our lucky hats that we had presented with ready. With our category they announced that it was a toss up between two teams so the brief excitement with our team being announced was quickly thrown off because we weren’t sure if we had one. Luckily, they called out our name “Stinky da Vinci” and the rest is history! Thank you to all the folks that put on Startup Weekend!

Why our team did so well:

As cliche as it sounds, synergy. I grew a much better understanding of the word after this weekend. First, our team had a very solid vision of what we wanted to build and the components that would make it compelling. This can’t be fabricated. If our idea had been less novel / interesting / value-adding, the vision would’ve been aimed much lower and therefore less powerful. Second, we all knew what roles we needed to play and since we were such a small team, there weren’t any politics. I’m now convinced that team/office politics are one of the worst poisons out there. Hard to fix and lethal to a productive/positive culture. Third, openness. All of us knew that we all wanted to build the best product possible and a company that could actually succeed whether or not we won the competition. Because of this, we weren’t afraid to lower our pride if a better idea or suggestion came about. Fourth, hard work. We all slaved away on the project and burned through the midnight oil as a team. Even if you don’t totally like someone you’re working with, it’s much easier to respect them if you know that they work their ass off and create good work. All of us created good work and added to what ultimately became the game and company.

DEMO:

After 54 hours of sleep deprivation we found out we would not be getting much sleep for another 72-96 hours because we had to pitch at the DEMO conference. I had initially expected to be done with Startup Weekend on Sunday and fly back to Seattle Monday at 7am but now I had to once again cancel the flight! Though this one wasn’t too hard of a decision to make. If you’re wondering what DEMO is, it’s a very well known launchpad for emerging technologies. Some of the famous successes include E-Trade, Salesforce.com, TiVo, VMware and WebEx. Companies that get selected to pitch have 6 minutes to show off their latest/greatest technology in front of an audience of angel/venture capital investors and press from around the globe. Though we weren’t looking for funding it was still an amazing opportunity to network with investors/press and just to be in the middle of so many innovations!

One of the standout technologies was a company called TourWrist which is basically an iPad app that gives you a 360 view of picture. Almost as if you’re reliving that moment in time. It’s amazing stitching technology and solid UI made it really stand out. I believe it’s free so I would urge anyone with an iPad or iPhone to check it out. You won’t be disappointed. Over the last two days I must have watched pitches from over 60 companies with a wide range of coolness and potential. Here are a some of my thoughts:

• Great presentation skills can make all the difference. Toopher was a company which allowed for secure authentication to your mobile phone. Doesn’t sound like the most interesting topic right? However the Founder/Speaker did a great job of adding in tons of humor, self-deprecation and ended by grinding up competitors products in a blender (literally). Needless to say he fully engaged the audience and made themfeel his message.
• While there were tons of breakout technologies, there were also tons of companies that seemed to solve a problem that didn’t exist. Or identified a problem that existed and built an irrelevant tool. One such example was a website which helped job seekers find jobs based on semantically understanding their resume and matching their Myers-Briggs with that of the job. First of all, job hunting is a pain in the ass and sucks not because companies don’t get enough resumes, but because companies don’t have the people that they want to hire in their immediate network. Most companies would always prefer to hire someone based on a recommendation from an employee or friend. It’s validation. And it stands on the integrity of the person making the recommendation. Second, the Myers-Briggs while in principle might be nice, is a pretty crude way to match people up for a job.
• Many companies, especially in the consumer space identified a problem and made a decent solution, but didn’t focus on the true business problem with consumer focused technology which distribution and adoption. One such example made a new DVR blending high quality, high storage capacity and a kitchen sink. To me, this is the typical “new” technology which has a bunch of new features, faster, cooler/sleeker, etc. But especially in this industry, the question is how are you going to distribute? Does the consumer actually want cooler, faster, more storage? Tons of companies flood into the TV/DVR space and few have had any success because they can’t get the consumer to actually adopt it. Google TV is going to make a run at the TV space as well.
• In this era, beautiful design/UI is essential. In fact, if your product is designed well enough, with solid aesthetics, and a simple UI, the product can do all the marketing for you. While Instagram isn’t exactly a business model, this was at the core of their success. Many companies had beautiful UI’s such as TourWrist, NotesCloud, DealAngel and Edamam.

These were some of the key areas that I thought separated the companies that had potential from the rest of the herd. And this is only a critique on their 6 minute presentation, I’m sure all of the companies could go more in depth on how they plan to approach their weaknesses. Here is a brief list of my favorites:

1. TourWrist - 360 imaging for iPad and iPhone. It’s really slick.
2. ZBoard – World’s first, weight-sensing electric skateboard. Basically Segway meets skateboard, it’s pretty sweet.
3. Toopher – Location based authentication to mobile phone
4. Dozuki – Easily create and share instructions / documentation
5. Fusion-io – Extremely efficient and cost effective new hardware innovations

The other half of DEMO was about the networking! After the sessions investors and press were able to network with all the companies. Our booth was setup on the wall by the entrance and we had the pleasure to meet investors, press, and tons of entrepreneurs from around the globe. DEMO did a great job producing the whole event with nothing really going wrong. And plenty of open bars =)

Thank you to the Startup Weekend team, Ahmed, Aaron, Marc, Franck, Claire and anyone else who I missed. Also, thanks to the DEMO team for putting on a great show!

#swbayMEGA caused a disruption in Silicon Valley with technology and innovation coming out of the Microsoft office in Mountain View.

As Douglas Crets of Microsoft BizSpark noted, we started the weekend with ”the entrepreneur spirit that gets us fired up enough to get mad about problems–and create solutions”, thanks to Dave McClure‘s riveting keynote welcome speech.

Scott Case from Startup America, John Cabrera, Writer of Warner Brother’s H+: The Digital Series, and Hiten Shah, of KISSmetrics also welcomed the crowd.

MEGA Startup Weekend Bay Area focused on three tracks: mobile, gaming and with the help of Andra Keay - robotics! The weekend brought together people with different skillsets – primarily software developers, graphics designers, roboticists, and business professionals – to build applications, robots and gaming platforms, and develop a commercial case around them in 54 hours. In total, 28 teams that built their idea and pitched to a panel of judges.

MEGA participants were given exclusive access to the Windows 8 experience using the tablet and phone that run on Windows 8 – both not yet available to the public - to create their projects.

There was also support from 50 mentors including: Hermione Way (The Next Web, BRAVO “Silicon Valley” TV Show), Patrick Vlaskovits (“The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development“), Jeff Gibboney (Transition Robotics, Inc.), Ross Ingram and Adam Wilson (Sphero), and Melonee Wise and Tully Foote (Willow Garage).

The winners:

• Robotics: Eyes on Demand - An on-demand remote human assistance, conceived for visually impaired people.
• Mobile: Predict Gaze - Helps companies better understand their customers through facial recognition on mobile devices.
• Gaming: Stinky Da Vinci - Competitive photo sharing mobile app game.

The prizes: See Claire Lee’s post for the full list.

Can’t wait to do it again!

What an awesome experience.

Today I am still drawn, like a bee to honey, to the #swbayMEGA Twitter stream and smiling as I can feel people’s joy and optimism, and looking at the pics.

Thank you to all the (300+) creatives and geeks, developers, designers and enthusiasts, mentors, experts, partners and friends, for showing up and making cool stuff. We just get to bask in all that energy and help you on your path to greatness.

Microsoft Silicon Valley is delighted to host this ground-breaking innovation station.

Alongside a number of of photo sharing apps and social games, we’re just so fired up to see such fantastic mobile apps like (mobile track winner) Predict Gaze and other impactful solutions to real world problems such as managing the fostering process, or enabling blind people access remote human assistance.

Not to mention the robots.

HUGE congrats to every single entrepreneur who formed teams and pitched their ideas.

Hard to argue with the quality of apps at this Mega – the largest Startup Weekend ever, anywhere. Kudos to the Startup Weekend folks: Marc, Franck, Ahmed – you deserve a lot of credit for creating and executing this model. Anyone who has facilitated a Startup Weekend knows the intense organization, and the myriad moving parts.

What makes these possible? Strong partnerships

The beauty of Mega is all of the Bay Area ecosystem players coming together, and lending their support and expertise: their generosity and enthusiasm helps a great deal.

DEMO are enabling all three winning teams go to DEMO Spring and pitch on stage.

Shout out to Sharon at Astia (who is jumping up and down today with glee at the opportunity to help female entrepreneurs via their program); to Adeo Ressi and Founder Institute (and their pledge to offer two scholarships to the Fall SV FI program); to Chris Gill from SV Forum who is offering the winning teams the chance to pitch to hundreds of investors at Launch 2012 in June; to Max Bloom from the brand new co-working space down 101, Ground Floor SV, for giving away membership.

Companies with best-of-breed solutions and resources to help startups succeed – like Twilio, Xero, 9Slides, CapLinked, and more … are giving free services to winners and teams. Make sure you get yours!

To mentors and experts: without your advice people cannot reach their potential and do great things. Especially the ones who got on planes to be with us.

Major points to T Scott Case and the Startup America crew, for  spending the whole weekend in the thick of it – and son Ryan for staying up late on Saturday to beat everyone at Black Ops on Xbox.

Shout out to the Microsoft SV staff, BizSpark team and SVC events team, for helping make it happen. To our friends at Silicon Valley Bank – thanks for the yummy wine (and the legendary headache this morning). To Gordon Biersch for the beer, and to all the other contributors: we are grateful for your assistance.

High Five to our friends in the Windows team: without you this event would not be!

Finally – don’t forget to get your premium Microsoft software (free) from BizSpark: Startup Weekend teams, use this URL to apply today: aka.ms/swbizspark

Our man Douglas has already captured some profound thoughts and, as he says, there’s more to come as we track the progress of those teams created this weekend, with hope and optimism.

Keep on Truckin’!

Every minute of Startup Weekend is valuable and important.  So you need to be defensive about your time: don’t sweat the details, and instead focus on what really matters.  Ahmed and the rest of the team do everything they can to make this an amazing weekend for you and let you focus on building things that are badassmazingtastic.  That’s what you’re here to do.

But there are some details that we just can’t do anything about.  Little things that you might need or want to make your weekend as productive and world-changing as it could possibly be.  For that – you have Zaarly.

Zaarly lets you post what you want, and just have it taken care of for you.  On both mobile and web, throw out what you want, what you’re willing to pay, and get back to work.  Offers will come in letting you know who can help you and how and let you know what they can do.

Here are some things that I’ve seen be pretty successful at previous SWs, things that might be helpful uses of Zaarly to keep focused on what matters, not sweat the little stuff.

• Use a Mac with Adobe Suite to make a quick product demo video
• Ride for our team back to SF (after CalTrain has stopped running)
• Runner to bring us Printouts from Kinko’s
• Someone to film a short video for the presentation
• A designer to make us a quick logo (if you don’t have one on your team)

There are a million other uses of Zaarly, but your creativity will be your greatest tool.

Check out and ask around if you’ve got questions – it’s always good to support a fellow Startup Weekend alum

Have a great Weekend!

We kickoff with Filmmaker/Actor John Cabrerra, who is going to enlighten us on how Hollywood is being disrupted, and tell us about a future where computers will be embedded in us.

Then we have a keynote from Dave McClure, Sith Lord at 500 Startups, talking about all things startup!  I don’t need to say anything more, it is F***ing Dave McClure!

Finally, we get go deep into our Customer Development talk with Hiten Shah, where he will help us understand how to ask the right questions from our customers.

Since 2003, he has written, directed, and produced a number of interactive and digital projects. In 2006, he shifted his focus more heavily towards writing and directing and has recently completed production on his newest series “H+“, which he developed at Warner Premiere under the guidance of Bryan Singer and his team of producers at Bad Hat Harry Productions.

As a guest speaker for MEGA Startup Weekend 2012, John answered some questions about the effect of mobile technology on Hollywood and the robotics industry:

How is mobile technology changing the landscape in Hollywood?

Well, I’d say from the audience’s perspective, it’s making the content easier to access, organize, consume. Right now, mobile seems to be the new DVD collection or the cabinet doors to a DVD collection that lives on the cloud. We’re also seeing a rise in mobile as the new TV network. All of this is, of course, changing the economics of motion picture entertainment, and in particular TV… so I think from the creator’s perspective there’s a mix of fear and excitement. Like, “Oh no! Will this make it harder to make money the way I was before?” and “Oh yes! More opportunities to tell stories!”

How is mobile technology changing the role of short form film on YouTube?

I think it’s going to be shrinking its role, actually. Cats playing pianos will always have a place in our lives, but a new trend is on the rise. That’s longer content that has substance of story or information. And video is such an integral part of mobile now, that I do think we’re going to see people staring at video on their tablets and phones for longer spans of time like reading a few chapters of a good book. I can even see mobile replacing cable boxes and TVs becoming nothing more than monitors for when we want to plop on the couch or watch while we cook.

Do you think big movie studios are losing control or are they just sitting back and watching?

Good question. I think a bit of both. Social, mobile, streaming, download is all bringing about big change in Hollywood. But remember, all the big studios are owned by parent companies. The Viacoms, TimeWarners, Sonys… and those guys aren’t losing control. They’re big and wealthy and they can gobble up when the time is right. But the physical studios themselves are staffed by a lot of people who frankly don’t understand the new forms of Internet distribution. And they’d love to see consumers buying DVDs for another decade. But that’s not gonna happen. So they’re trying as best they can to hold on, learn the new methods, save their jobs maybe. But it’s not easy.

Regarding your newest series H+, when do you think computers will begin to be implanted in humans?

They already are! In 2004 a paralyzed man moved a mouse cursor with his thoughts using a big clunky computer implanted in his head. That was 2004! Fast forward to 2012 and we have Google announcing Project Glass. I feel pretty confident we’ll have H+ style computers interfacing the nervous system by the middle of the century.

Do you predict that robots will take over the world at some time?

Depends on what you mean by “take over”. In some ways you could say they already have taken over. I mean, they’ve taken over so many aspects of our functioning world. In a good way, though. Street lights, assembly lines. Do I think they’ll pick up guns and start a war against humans? No. But that doesn’t mean we couldn’t go extinct before the machines… and that they couldn’t go on “living” without us. Which would be sort of natural. We could also evolve with the machines… become the machines. That’s also a kind of “take over”, right?

What is your opinion of the state of robotics? Why do you think this is a good time to be a robotics entrepreneur?

First off, I think someone desperately needs to unlock the holy grail of robotics… a pro level breakdancing robot. Secondly, I think that robotics + wireless internet opens up an enormous amount of potential consumer applications, particularly in the home. We’re just at the beginning of all that, so if I was a robotics entrepreneur, I’d have a notebook full of ideas. Heck, I should probably fill a notebook with ideas anyway and just find me a robotics engineer. Maybe I’ll find one this weekend.