All developer teams will get a 15 minute meeting with each mentor who are leaders from the Auto industry OEM companies! This will take place Friday afternoon. A great opportunity to get feedback on your ideas and make great connections for future business.
These are the mentors joining us, some of whom will also be our distinguished judges:
Mentor & Judge
Dani Essindi Behrendt is a tech entrepreneur and investor with more than 15 years of experience in technology, consumer Internet, and media. He is currently the strategic alliance lead at Honda Silicon Valley Lab, Honda’s open innovation lab, where he works on strategy, innovation, and tech investments.
Mentor & Judge
Serge Matynia has joined Renault Silicon Valley in 2012 as Innovation Project Manager. He is currently leading different collaborations with local startups and labs on Driver Understanding capabilities, to support the future user experience in the car. He is also involved in business-model and usage research on Shared-Mobility services, as well as on Electric Vehicles.
Mentor
Shad Laws joined Renault in Silicon Valley as an Innovation Project Manager in 2013. He is currently leading Renault’s autonomous driving efforts in California, including collaborations with labs and startups, as well as exploring some vehicle connectivity projects. He has a background in engineering, design, startups, and software development.
Mentor & Judge
Chuhee Lee is the Deputy Director at Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab (ERL) in Belmont, California. He is currently overseeing the Infotainment Software team and the Multimedia Applications at the ERL focusing on Networked Infotainment, Networked Environment, and Multimedia topics. Mr. Lee is also leading the Intelligent Mobility group at the ERL and responsible for the Volkswagen ERL Technology Accelerator program.
Mentor
David Nishijima is Sr. Consultant, Strategic Planning & Partnerships at Nissan North America. David advises Nissan’s Vehicle Information Technology (VIT) division, which is responsible for the organization’s global connected vehicle strategy, on innovative connected vehicle services and technologies, including connected services, communications technologies and the overall user experience. David has more than 16 years experience in the automotive and IT industries here in the Silicon Valley. Previously, he established Toyota’s local IT Center where led corporate development and technology planning.
Mentor & Judge
Vinuth Rai is a Director at the Toyota InfoTechnology Center (ITC) in Mountain View, CA. He works on developing platforms and services for the next generation of Toyota’s connected vehicles in an effort to define new business opportunities for Toyota. He spends a typical day working with members from various groups within ITC to define what the “connected vehicle experience” could be. This includes creating wireframes, launching pilot services or establishing partnerships with technology companies. Vinuth has a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and a Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University. He enjoys spending time with his family and exploring the hills surrounding Silicon Valley on his bicycle.
Judge
Robert Seidl is Managing Director Motus Ventures. Seidl started his first company while still in high school a long time ago. For the past three decades, he has started a number of software companies, held engineering as well as marketing and executive leadership roles, and worked in well known Silicon Valley companies like Apple and Adobe following acquisitions.
Robert has an engineering background, but has always focused on creating user friendly products. In 1995 he founded the company that built the first commercial dedicated web page editor and web site management tool: PageMill, quickly acquired by Adobe and generating over 20M in sales in its first year. In 2000, Metacreations Inc. acquired his next company, Canoma, whose technology allowed rapid creation of photorealistic, textured 3D models from images. You might also have seen these concepts in Google’s Building Maker software. Since 2002, he has managed Realtime Video Systems, a technology licensing company that provides US drone vendors with video processing and object tracking software. Meanwhile, he cofounded a MDV/Accel/Emergence/Walden funded startup called Genius.com which provides sales and marketing people at B2B companies with easy to use and realtime lead generation and nurturing tools.
Robert serves on the Transportation Advisory Board for ProspectSV.
Autotech Council Developer Challenge 2014 