Thoughts after the Menorca TechTalk

After Whisher was acquired by wifi.com in mid-January, I was to continue working as CTO for the new venture as part of the deal. Since I had worked on the technology since the very first day, it made sense that I continued to oversee the development of the new phase of the project. In April, news came out that Rob Monster, who headed the venture fund Monster Venture Partners, had shut down the fund and needed to cut costs on all the startups he was funding as a result. This lead to an awkward situation which left me in a limbo, with no income, and no significant equity. I’m waiting for the issues to be worked out, but things are not particularly promising right now.

Spiritus – the divine breath – inspiration^[1]

What I need most after this transition was inspiration, so after I saw Martin’s post about TechTalk ’09 in Menorca, I sent an email asking if I could join the event. Reply quickly came that while the full event was…well…full, I was welcome to come on the Friday for the talk itself, scheduled for the afternoon. The TechTalk is a loose-scheme round table, where people can stand and share their views, problems or ask questions, and then interact with others during the rest of the event, in a very relaxed and beautiful setting.

As a kid, I had visited Menorca every summer with my parents. We would rent a small house for a month, in places such as Cala en Porter, Cala Galdana, or the beautiful Cala Morell. Menorca is also ripe with archeological features (one of my other interests), with many neolithic constructions such as the Naveta d’es Tudons, and the many taulas and talaiots from around 2.000 a.C. The archeological museum in Mahón, with its necropolis, is also of great interest. Going back after many years would be very interesting, even if I didn’t have the time to tour around the island.

The arrival

Call it fate, but Jordi Vallejo (Fon’s CTO) and I had been trying to meet so that he could give me one of the new Fonera 2.0 routers to try out. Even though we live very close, plans were always thwarted one way or another. Turns out he was sitting two rows in front of me on the flight from Barcelona to Menorca. We took a taxi to Torrenova, Martin’s villa, which left us at the gate after a difficult ride through narrow dirt tracks.

A lesson in optical physics and muon detection

Behind our taxi was a small rented Mercedes, and in it was Isaac Shpantzer, who offered us a ride to cover the rest of the dirt track up to the villa. And what a ride! It turns out that Isaac was a NextNet founder, invented OFDM, and was currently working at CeLight, a company that develops high-tech for communication and military applications. One example is a high-bandwidth optical communication system that points a blue laser towards the sky (and it is blue for a reason, but I’m not telling – it’s really really clever), and uses coherent detectors to grab scattered photons which have been modulated to convey data. We are talking terabits per second throughput – truly amazing. He was preparing a demo on Friday or Saturday night, but sadly I was leaving earlier, it was sad to miss it!

Another interesting development he explained during the trip was a nuclear device detector – picture a small nuclear bomb inside a steel crate shipped to the US by a terrorist group. Current detection methods are essentially x-ray arches and physical inspections. CeLight’s method relies on cosmic radiation detection. This radiation is composed in part of a negatively-charged particle called the muon. Powerful x-rays work at 120 keV, whereas a muon has an energy just over 105 MeV – thus, it has a huge penetration power, much higher than electrons. Every square meter of the Earth is hit by about 10,000 muons per minute. Since nuclear weapon cores consist of very dense, positively charged material, placing two detector plates above and below a steel container should show a straight path of muons hitting both plates, unless they pass through the nuclear core, in which the polarity difference deflects their trajectory. It’s a very neat idea, and they have a working prototype already.

Settling in

We moved into Binisegarra for a couple of hours before lunch, and had the chance to talk with a few people. Many were chilling inside the pool, trying not to get stung by the approximately 4,921 wasps that were flying around it (my most accurate count, they were moving so it was hard to keep track). Saw many known faces such as Loic, Anil, Michael Jackson (no, not that one), Rodrigo, and Ola.

Time for lunch

We had a very nice buffet lunch, and talked to Dina Kaplan of Blip.tv, who also runs the NY Founders Club, which is an interesting idea which could be taken to Barcelona. There are some events already happening here to promote interaction between startups, but nothing like Founders Club (if there is, let me know!).

The talk

Since there were so many people this year, instead of having everyone stand up and say their bit, volunteers spoke about their startups, problems or questions for the audience. It was interesting to hear Isaac’s presentation (which was way less technical than in the car but still left some puzzled faces), and Deborah’s project involving the location of firefighters in 3D space through time-reversal techniques – it’s a shame we didn’t get to talk more on the subject. Ola (the other half of Sweden!) related his most embarrassing story ever, involving clothes (or the lack thereof), a hotel in Chueca, and room locks – all in exchange for solutions to his fix-the-world problem.

Catching the last flight home

It was sad to have to leave as many activities went on during the weekend, and those are the real opportunity to talk to people about their projects and learn from them, but it was time to go. Alejandro Santana was kind enough to drive me to the airport, even though he had a later flight to Madrid.

In all, it was a very good experience after many months of stress due to a number of situations, the worst just having come to light as I was typing this post – more on it later. All I can say is that I found the inspiration to get going again, and look for new exciting projects (either join or start them). Thanks Martin for hosting such an event in such a beautiful setting!

[1] Quote taken from the movie Always, when Hop tells Pete that his task will be to inspire a young pilot as he gets started in firefighting attack planes.