Author Archives: Lee Devlin

About Lee Devlin

I'm Lee Devlin from Greeley, Colorado.

Entconnect 2008 Recap

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EntConnect 2008 is over and it was another great conference. We had a number of new people there this year, thanks to the efforts of our regular attendees in recruiting like-minded individuals. Historically, our attendees were primarily made up of those who were Midnight Engineering Magazine readers or who had attended previous conferences. With the magazine out of print, we recognized EntConnect was taking on the feel of a reunion which is not a sustainable way to run an annual conference. People often acquire other responsibilities so eventually, without new recruits, a conference that depends only on previous attendees will shrink down to the point where it makes no sense to continue holding it. We all enjoy the conference too much to let that happen.

At the end of each conference in the past, we had brainstormed on ways to make it better, but in the time that elapses between the conference, everyone gets busy and no one has the time to do the promotion. EntConnect is a small conference and it’s not a money-making venture, just a labor of love that barely covers its expenses, so we don’t have a big budget for promoting it. This year a small group of volunteers started having regular conference calls about 8 weeks before the event. We offered a substantial discount for early bird pricing (which is now in effect for the 2009 conference), and we also enabled the ability to register and take credit cards on-line via a service called RegOnline. In addition, more of us have the administration privileges to modify the website, which reduces the workload for John Gaudio, the conference organizer.

After the early bird pricing expired, we offered discount codes of up to 1/3 off the cost of the conference and promoted it to local groups and individuals who would be a good fit for EntConnect. That effort didn’t really produce the results we had hoped for. I’d estimate that more than 1000 people became aware of the conference through various email and on-line promotions, but only one person signed up with a discount code. Most thought that the reason for the low response rate was that it was done within 4 weeks of the conference and people have their plans already solidified by that time. So it may have been too late for this kind of last minute conference promoting. It seems that word-of-mouth has remained our most effective form of recruiting.

As much as I enjoy seeing the regular attendees, the highlight of the show this year was meeting the new attendees who are engaged in startups and other entrepreneurial activities. Several of the new attendees also gave presentations. Nathan Seidle of Spark Fun Electronics gave a great presentation on how he started his company while a junior in college and has experienced 100% year-on-year growth in his business for the past 4 years. Rob McNealy of Startup Story Radio talked about his startup experiences and gave a great storyboard presentation about his thoughts on entrepreneurship. Howard Keating of ZANA Network talked about his company’s mission and on the topic of intellectual property as it applies to the small business owner. Steve Schmutzer of Firefly Medical gave an engaging presentation entitled ‘Ten Lessons I Learned as an Entrepreneur’ as well as bringing along a prototype of his company’s revolutionary Infusion Management System.

We had 35 people sign up for the conference and with 5 cancellations, we ended up with 30 attendees. Of the 30 attendees, we had 11 first-timers, which is probably a new record. In addition to those I mentioned previously, we had Mike O’Neil of Integrated Alliances who gave a presentation on using LinkedIn, Gary Lundquist who talked about his latest venture, InnoSearch Colorado, and Andrea Shaver, the 13-year-old daughter of Dave Shaver, who gave an outstanding presentation on leadership and how she helped raise money for a specially-designed wheelchair for a disabled girl.

It was also great to meet other first-time attendees, including Kristie Colby of Colby Creating Consulting, Isaac Davenport of Syncroness Product Development, and Susan and Christopher Smith.

This was the first year I had time to participate in the pre-conference activities. We had intended to go skiing, but after having a delayed start on Thursday morning, my friend Court and I decided to just do some sight-seeing in Denver instead. First we stopped at the REI Denver flagship store and Court demonstrated his rock climbing prowess, quickly ascending a 5.10 level difficulty climb on one of the the tallest indoor freestanding climbing walls in the world. Next we went to Casa Bonita for lunch. I had never been there before, but had heard so much about it. It’s a combination of carnival, theater, indoor theme park, arcade, and yes, you can eat there too. We explored many of the restaurant’s 52,000 sq. ft. which seats approximately 1100 people in a number of areas with different themes. After that, it was off to do some Indoor Skydiving where I got to experience a whole new sensation of flying on a column of air. Later that evening we met at the hotel lounge for some dinner and conversation with several other conference attendees.

On Friday, we had a very late breakfast, which actually became our lunch, and about a dozen of us went out for some high performance go cart racing. The carts will go over 50 mph, so it was quite a thrill the drive them around a track which bore more than a passing resemblance to a scaled down Formula One track, complete with tight hairpin turns and super fast straight-aways that really required one’s full concentration to stay in control. After that, we went to the Cherry Creek Family Shooting Center to do some trap shooting. It had been about 20 years since I had last gone trap shooting, so I struggled to break just over half the clay targets, but it was still a lot of fun. In the evening, we headed across the street from the hotel along with about two dozen other conference attendees to the Black Angus Steak House for dinner. There we met Nathan Seidle, who entertained us with his Port-o-Rotary phone. Later, we assembled in the hotel bar until they told us they were ready to close.

On Saturday I went down to the conference room about 8:00 to see if they needed any help setting up. I won’t go into the details of the speakers, but you can get an idea of the speakers/topics from the 2008 schedule. We broke for dinner and got back a little late, around 7:30 p.m., and launched into the evening presentations. After the last presentation was over at 11:00 p.m. I got to play some poker, a game of Texas Hold ’em, which I had never played before but the rest of the players were familiar enough to talk me through the number of chips I needed to put in to keep up with the others. It wasn’t like any other poker game I’ve ever played, but I ended up coming in second. Surprisingly, the winner, Rob Packard, passed on the Garmin C340 GPS and so I walked away with the grand prize. My wife is thrilled with it ;-). I didn’t get back to my hotel room until near
ly 2:00 a.m.

Sunday morning I was able to wake up at 7:00 a.m. without too much trouble and met some of the others in the restaurant where we had breakfast. The presentations started at 9:00 a.m. and continued until about 2:00 p.m.. We then packed up the conference room and about 16 of us headed out for a late lunch at a nearby Mexican restaurant. After that, I drove Court to the airport for his flight back to California and then headed home myself. I was tired but content that the conference had gone very well and that we’ll have a number of new recruiters to help expand next year’s conference.

If you’re reading this and are interested in running your own small business or startup, you should consider coming to the 2009 EntConnect conference. It’s 50% off if you sign up now, and you can keep you calendar clear so you know that you’ll make it. There’s no better way to learn than to get advice from those who have gone before you and you’ll certainly meet many of them at EntConnect which will be held in Lakewood, CO March 26-29, 2009.

Electric Scooters and 3-Wheeled Fantasies

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Back in 1987, on a cold January day, I found a Harley-Davidson ElectraGlide Classic advertised in the local newspaper.I had known from a relatively young age that the one thing separating me from true and everlasting happiness was owning a Harley-Davidson motorcycle. And so, with that in mind, I embarked on the pursuit of making that bike mine. It had been repossessed and was owned by the local bank, and they only wanted to get the bad loan off their books, so they did little to properly advertise the bike. It was in a shop in an out-of-the way place and so I went over to take a look at it. It was in very good condition, only 3 years old and had the highly desirable 80 cu. inch Evolution V-twin engine which was new for the 1984 model year. It also had an accessory that was not on my ‘must have’ list, namely, a sidecar. I always felt a sidecar looked somewhat odd on a motorcycle, but I reasoned that if I could get the bike for a price that made the sidecar look virtually ‘free’, it would be a good deal because I could always sell the sidecar separately. New sidecars added about $3500 to the cost of a Harley at the time. So I put in a bid slightly below the motorcycle’s book value and in a relatively short time, the bike was in my garage.

The first thing I noticed about riding a bike with a sidecar was that it felt very strange going around corners. Previously, cornering was an exhilarating experience on a motorcycle, but with the sidecar, it became a chore because I felt like I was being thrown off the bike. When turning right, going a little too fast could actually bring the sidecar’s wheel off the ground. I decided that the sidecar, as novel as it looked, took much of the joy out of riding and I promptly removed it. For the next 8 years, the sidecar sat idle while I rode the bike without it. Finally, I sold the sidecar to someone who wanted it, content that I’d never use it again.

I eventually sold the Harley too, after 16 years of owning it, for approximately what I paid for it, around $7500. For those of you who think I’m a shrewd investor, if I used the $7500 and purchased Harley stock instead of that bike, the stock’s value over the same period would have been worth nearly $400,000, so the bike wasn’t really a great investment compared with owning a part of the Harley Davidson company. But “50-bagger” stocks are few and far between and Harley stock has now been flat for about the past 7 years. However, the same amount of money invested in the S&P index would have yielded about $40,000 over the same 16-year period, so again, the Harley would hardly qualify as an ‘investment’.

Here are the lessons I learned from it:

1. There is no one material thing that separates you from true happiness.

2. When you think there is, take the money and buy a stock market index fund instead.

3. Continue searching for the one and only thing that separates you from true happiness.

The reason I mention this experience is because I’ve been contemplating alternative modes of transportation and trying to imagine what a fuel-efficient futuristic vehicle might look like. I spend about 7 months of the year riding my BMW1150RT motorcycle, which was my mid-life crisis replacement for the Harley. I do really enjoy riding it. But for the other 5 months, I need something that can deal with cold weather and snow typical of Colorado winters. Many, if not most, of my cold weather trips are made solo, which means I could use a two-place vehicle like a motorcycle since I don’t need all the room afforded by an SUV. Ideally, it would have very little frontal area and would need to be fully enclosed. Most critically, it would need to be able to lean into turns. Oh, and I must look cool while riding/driving it. I almost forgot to mention that, but it’s probably more important than any other consideration for most people.

I thought I saw the future of transportation at Epcot nearly 20 years ago when I saw the ‘Lean Machine’ , a fully-enclosed 3-wheel vehicle that looked very much like what I just described and capable of leaning into corners. But the machine was designed by GM and they apparently opted not to pursue it, probably because the public was more interested in buying SUVs, trucks, and Hummers than single-seat quirky vehicles with excellent fuel economy.

Now that gas is heading toward $4/gallon with no end in sight, fuel economy is starting to appear on everyone’s radar screen again as a desirable attribute in a vehicle.

An electric motor scooter was profiled in the ‘First Ride’ section of the latest issue of Motorcyclist magazine and it got me to thinking about whether it may be just the right time for an electric motorcycle or possibly a futuristic 3-wheel leaning vehicle to come to the market. The electric motor scooter profiled is called the Vectrix Maxi-Scooter and it has an electric 20 KW (26.8 HP) motor, along with a 200lb., 3.7 kWh battery. Simple math will tell you that this battery would hold about 11 minutes of juice if you were able to run the vehicle at full power, although that probably wouldn’t be possible to do unless you were climbing up a hill at full speed. The company states that the scooter will get between 20 to 60 miles per charge depending on how it’s driven. A charge takes 2 hours to get to 80% battery capacity. The author in the Motorcyclist article got 40 miles from a charge. So it would stand to reason that average riding consumes about 95 Wh per mile. To put that in perspective, it’s the same as using 1 oz. of gasoline per mile assuming a 30% thermal conversion efficiency in an internal combustion engine. You don’t need a calculator to realize this is the equivalent of 128 mpg. The entire battery holds about the same amount of energy as 1/3 of a gallon of gasoline, again assuming a 30% thermal conversion efficiency. Since 1/3 of a gallon of gasoline weighs about 2 lbs., the energy density ratio of the NiMH battery to gasoline is 1:100. Herein lies the biggest problem with electric vehicle energy storage and that is energy density or lack thereof. The 200 lb battery accounts for 43% of the scooter’s 462 lb weight. That’s a nearly identical battery-to-vehicle weight ratio of the GM EV1 that I wrote about previously. With an MSRP of nearly $12K, this scooter costs about twice what an equivalent gas powered scooter would cost.

I have a confession to make. I like riding scooters. I didn’t think I would, but Terri and I rented one our honeymoon and we explored most of Grand Cayman on it. I know that I don’t look cool on a motor scooter — no guy does — but I had already landed the girl, and she didn’t seem to mind, so I figured, “What the heck? I might as well enjoy it.” We rented a scooter in Tuscany and loved it too, especially on the back country roads between Florence and Sienna. We did find ourselves forc
ed to use the autostrada while on a jaunt over to Pisa and the 125cc engine strained to keep up with the flow of traffic. So when no one is watching, I’ll ride a scooter, preferably with a full-faced helmet and dark face shield, so no one will recognize me.

But I’ve tasted what it’s like to ride Ducati and when you pull up at a stop light on a bike like that, everyone just stares, mouths agape, and it’s then that you know you’ve truly arrived. Women want you, men want to be you. You can’t overestimate the psychic value of looking cool on your ride.

So how can we solve the fuel economy/cool factor/all-weather transportation needs of the future? Well, the primary issue is the coolness factor. It has to look cool, not geeky, and be quick too, because the coolness factor will wear off quickly if you’re getting passed by bicycles. Secondly, It must lean into corners, because if it doesn’t, it will either need to be wide or unstable. Third, it must be enclosed for cold weather. That means it needs either three wheels or outrigger wheels that deploy when stopping to keep you from tipping over. I’ve seen a few examples of the latter, but for some odd reason they all cost upward of $100K. It could be an all-electric vehicle, but not if it requires gobs of weight in batteries. So I think that means that it may need to be a hybrid.

I’ve seen a few promising examples of what I’ve described and I’ll show some pictures and links here:

Venture is an American licensee of the leaning technology developed by the Dutch company Carver. Make sure to visit their website and watch the videos, most of which are of the Carver.

Carver seems like it’s ahead of the game here, with vehicles available for sale, although at a hair-raising price of €50,000 (about U.S. $75,000)

And the Carver can really lean over dramatically

BMW even seems to have at least a concept version of a 3-wheel vehicle called the ‘Clever’.

The vehicle of my dreams may be available today, but it’s priced beyond what I’m willing to pay. For now I guess I’ll have to be content to ride a 45-mpg BMW sport touring bike in warm weather and suffer sticker shock each time I fill up at the pump with my 14-mpg Dodge Durango in the winter months. I do love the Durango because it will comfortably haul 7 people around in the nastiest weather Colorado can dish out and it can even swallow whole sheets of 4’x 8’ plywood. It’s hard to put a price on that. But the weather’s warming up now and I’m itching to lean into some curvy canyon roads so it feels like it’s time to pull out the BMW.

And, if at some point if you see some dude cruising by on a geeky electric scooter with a full-faced helmet and dark face shield, it just may be me. 🙂

UPDATE: 2009-01-15 After re-reading my advice to ‘buy a stock market index fund instead’ I have to confess with perfect 20/20 hindsight that no longer looks like very sound advice 🙁

LinkedIn tip – Avoiding multiple accounts

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I first found out about LinkedIn from my friend Jack Krupansky a few years ago at the EntConnect conference. At the time, we didn’t know what LinkedIn would become, but both Jack and I are curious individuals and so I decided to join him on LinkedIn. For several months, Jack was my only connection. Over time, I got a few more invitations from people who I didn’t know but who had many connections already. These were people who sought to become ‘super-connected’ individuals. They had impressive credentials and I was happy to connect with them. But after a few years, I still only had a handful of connections because I had never invited anyone to join my network. From what I understand, this is fairly typical behavior of most new initiates to LinkedIn. About a year ago, I decided to be more proactive about connecting to people on LinkedIn and subsequently did much more investigation of it by taking a class from Integrated Alliances and reading the books, ‘I’m on LinkedIn, Now What?‘ by Jason Alba and ‘The Virtual Handshake‘ by Scott Allen and David Teten. After joining NoCoNet, a local career networking group, I found that I had many more opportunities to meet and connect with people. I later became the chairman of NoCoNet’s LinkedIn committee and so I’m much more proficient with using it and helping others to use it.

About a month ago, Peter Olins, our NoCoNet president, asked me to prepare a ‘LinkedIn Tip of the Week’ for our members and so I have started doing that and will be sharing them in the blog for everyone’s benefit after I’ve presented them. I posted one earlier about using the ‘Groups and Affiliations‘.

This week’s tip is on how to avoid having multiple LinkedIn accounts. Everyone seems to have more than one email address these days, and if a LinkedIn member were to invite you to connect using an email address that LinkedIn does not know about, it’s possible to end up with an extra LinkedIn account. This may happen when someone uploads his Outlook contacts list and then uses a feature of LinkedIn that allows him to invite everyone in that list. You may find yourself getting multiple invitations, possibly from someone to whom you’re already connected. If LinkedIn thinks you’re an entirely new person based on an email address it does not recognize, it will set up a separate account and if you click on the link to respond, you may find it asking for your name and to fill in your profile again. I’ve seen this happen when people use email forwarders. For example, say you have an address that is for your college’s alumni association looks like “your.name@csu.org” or something similar that simply forwards mail to a Yahoo email account. It’s possible you’ve given out both addresses to people over the years and you may appear twice in their Outlook contacts lists. If you don’t have both your “your.name@csu.org” AND your Yahoo email address in LinkedIn’s database, you might get multiple invitations to connect to a person and if you respond to the invitation sent to the address that LinkedIn does not know about, you can end up with two separate accounts.

If you didn’t know about this little feature, you may end up with an extra LinkedIn account. The only way to delete a duplicate account is to send an email to LinkedIn’s customer support (cs@linkedin.com). Make sure to let them know which account you want deleted.

To avoid this situation, you should put all your email addresses in your profile. LinkedIn will only use the one you designate as a primary address to send you email. However, it will know that if someone sends an invitation to any of your email addresses, it will recognize it as an existing account and not try to set up a new account for you.


The way to do that is to go the upper right hand corner of a LinkedIn screen and select Account and Settings. Then, from the menu that appears, under Personal Settings select Email Addresses. Add every email address that you use. If you’re about to leave an employer, make sure to do this before you leave, because you do have to verify the address by responding to a link that LinkedIn will send to that address.

Energy and Entconnect

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I am trying to recruit one of my favorite gurus to attend the EntConnect conference this year. If you’re into electronics, you’ve no doubt heard of Don Lancaster. Don is a prolific writer and has written numerous columns in most of the electronics hobbiest magazines over the years. He’s also authored numerous electronics books such as the TTL Cookbook and the CMOS Cookbook. Nowadays, his columns can be found on his website.

Don was responsible for my finding out about Midnight Engineering magazine and so he’s indirectly responsible for my involvement with the EntConnect conference. Similarly, many other conference attendees give him credit for their discovery of it as well.

My favorite articles that Don writes about are related to energy, especially his energy fundamentals article. He recently followed it up with another one entitled more energy fundamentals. I also appreciate his take on patents.

I’ve asked him to run a banner ad on his site for the conference. I’ve combined two elements that are distinctly Don, the aqua blue color of his website and the word ‘tinaja’. We’ll see if he chooses to run it as is or if I’ll be doing some editing of it. You can see the example below. And…if you’re interested in coming to EntConnect, please note the discount code available in the banner ad when you register.