Intel confab roundup: Beer and earthquakes, flying cars and IPOs

There was a lot going in the Palm Desert heat

Stadium fun

One of our favorite conversations was with the CEO of VenueNext, John Paul.

VenueNext's basic mission is to vastly improve your experience of big sports stadiums. And it does both a simple and very complex thing – gets everything inside a stadium to communicate over a network that pinpoints location.

In the simplest sense, if you download its app (actually a sports team branded version of its app), you can get directions to the nearest toilet/bar/hotdog stand in your phone.

But the big changes are much more interesting. For example, it allows teams to "buy" season ticket holders seats off them for games they can't attend by giving them a virtual currency that they can then spend in the stadium.

Rather than fans working through third-parties like StubHub, the team can buy the seats and resell them. It gets the money, and the fan gets bucks with less hassle. And those bucks go back into the stadium – whether food, or merchandise.

One of the most interesting side effects of this, Paul told us, was that at a recent end-of-season NBA game when the stadium would normally have been half empty (it was two bottom-league teams playing each other), the venue was packed. Why? Because all the fans were spending their virtual currency before it ran out at the end of the season.

In what was a more exciting prospect for us was a beer experiment and promotion that the company recently ran. Rather than having to queue up for beer, a woman with a big bucket of cold beers set up temporarily at one part of the stadium and the company sent a text to all the people with its app in a certain section offering them a promotional beer price.

They could buy it on the app and then simply wander over, show the purchase on their phone and grab a beer. No queuing, no nonsense. According to Paul, over 37 per cent of those that got the message got themselves a beer and 30 per cent of them used the same service for each of the next four games.

It's harder to argue to with faster, easier beer.

IPO

One thing that struck us as interesting was the CEO of Nasdaq, Adena Friedman, walking through no just what made a good IPO but talking about how Nasdaq – the predominantly tech based stock market – was planning to sell/license its technology.

Nasdaq, as you would imagine, has some pretty nifty trading software that can do very, very fast pricing, trading and authentication. That software is used to run over 90 other markets but Nasdaq reckons it could be used for a whole range of other applications – anything in fact where clearing, settlement, indexing and data is the core component.

Which sounds to us like pretty much any blockchain application. And, as recent months have shown, there is seemingly nothing in the world that can't be given a blockchain makeover.

While talking of IPOs, we have to reluctantly take our hat off to Intel Capital CEO Wendell Brooks.

Back in October 2016, at an earlier conference, we expressed some skepticism about Brooks' claim that 2017 was going to be a bumper IPO year. But it turns out he was right: stats shared at the conference showed Intel Capital with no less than 10 IPOs in 2017, compared to two the year before and three the year before that. Impressive.

Feel your way

And lastly, just to show that the conference wasn't all about the sort of applications and services that only huge companies or rich people can get access to, there is Proglove.

Which we repeatedly read as Prog-love and were a little confused about its function until its CEO Jonas Giradet waved a a grey-and-orange glove in our faces and we realized it was Pro-glove.

In essence, the Pro-glove is a hard-wearing glove that people working in warehouses, manufacturing plants and so on wear but with an RFID scanner built into the top. The scanner is triggered with a button built into the glove on the left side of your first finger so you can easily and simply press it with your thumb.

It's not sexy but it is exactly the sort of clever design that can make people's lives easier, and make processes run much faster. As more and more objects have RFID chip embedded into them, it's all too easy to imagine multiple additional scanning steps being required – wave it over the scanner over there every time; or, worse, forget to scan something and then have to double-back on yourself to make sure it has been scanned.

This glove should help warehouse guys, which should help all of us. It might make the difference between that package arriving this afternoon or Friday.

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So there you have it – some cutting-edge but close-to-everyday-use technology. It's a fun conference. ®