makerfaire.com:

Maker Faire Bay Area 2009
The Universal Remote Control Platform (URCP)

Stage C , Sunday 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Stage A , Sunday 4:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Imagine a universal remote control device that controls your home entertainment center, home alarm system AND functions as your interactive programming guide. This presentation, by digital entrepreneur Mark Sigal and Square Connect (doing the demo) will discuss the hardware and accessories that you need to build an iPod touch/iPhone powered universal remote control “touch pad.” It will show you the necessary wireless signaling protocols that you need to control your home entertainment center, activate and deactivate your home alarm, turn on, off or dim lights, and more. Finally, premised on an objective of making media more interactive, Mark will introduce an framework (lifecycle) for thinking about social, metadata and services overlays and interconnects.

Don’t miss it.

Web site: http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/06/innovation-inev.html

About the Maker(s)

Mark Sigal
I am an eight time entrepreneur who has spent the better part of the past 21 years seeding new ventures (as founder, CEO or seed investor/board member) in the Digital Media (Me.com/Apple, vSocial, CafeNet, Verdada), Networked Device (Tribe, Whistle), Systems Management (Rapid Logic/Wind River, UXComm, Kenamea), Real Estate (CBM) and Renewable Energy (Phoenix Energy) spaces. I have been fortunate enough to have realized four liquidity events for my companies, including sales to IBM, Apple and Wind River, and a core part of my focus these days is on infrastructure plays, with an emphasis on the reinvention of media, interactivity and advertising for a mobile broadband powered world. My five primary projects right now are: vSocial, a white label video service targeted at the social media contest/campaign space; Snapp Networks, a social networking platform business (we sold the consumer portion, Me.com, to Apple); Insider Engine, a stock investing service; Phoenix Energy, a biomass power plant builder; and Verdi Capital , my angel investing entity. I have had plenty of professional and financial success but have also endured and overcome enough challenges to understand the role of luck, faith, timing, iteration and just plain resilience in making it all work out in the end. I have a great wife and two really awesome sons. I have maintained a bikram yoga practice without slippage for the past ten years, and read a bucket-full. To help facilitate really peeling back the onion on interesting topics, I created a topical discussion group called Chatopic with my friend and previous business partner, Steve Lee. If you think that you are a potential contributor of ideas, skills, deal flow, connections or money to the projects that I am working on, shoot me an email and let’s talk. I can be reached at msigal at gmail dot com.
http://thenetworkgarden.com/weblog/2008/06/innovation-inev.html