After selling my Turkish gas company in June 2011, I have time to concentrate on some of my other unusual investments:
1. Themis Bar Review, a computer assisted preparations to take the bar exam which introduced 4 years ago, embedded evaluation questions every 17-20 minutes of a lecture.
Now Universities establishing on-line courses are using embedded questions (Princeton, Penn, Michigan, Stanford and Berkeley) and embedded quizzes (Harvard-MIT).Despite fierce competition from former and convicted monopolist BAR/BRI, the course is prospering with pass rates far better than our competitors in every state for 3 years.
2. An electric motor car company that has developed a far superior car battery to our competitors “Leaf” and “Volt”,
3. A developer and producer of small wind wind turbines (10K-50K),
4. A San Francisco company called Dyn-Ed who has a computer assisted language learning program to teach English to foreign speakers all over the world (primarily in China) via a state-of-the-art artificial intelligence and voice recognition systems. We have almost 2 dozen courses for everything from 3-5 year olds, to those wanting to teach business school classes in English, and last but not least;
5. Peter McGowen (’56 I think?) and I are investors in a company called ixReveal which has developed software which can analyze vast volumes of data and distill trends or unusual data with minimal costs in time and manpower.
Fortunately, my son resigned from Calvert school and as of January 1, 2012, is working with me in my Baltimore office. Because of David, and the allure of 2 young grandkids, I am spending more time in Baltimore and less in St. Croix. The STX economy is in free fall after the Closing of the major employer ( Hovensa Refinery) in February. Workers are departing the Island in droves, resulting in an extraordinary buyer’s market for some very nice homes.
I still see Clayton Moravec frequently now that he has moved to downtown Baltimore, but Josiah Willard is so busy playing golf and traveling (often to see his 3 kids), that he is hard to track down.
Harvey Clapp Class of 1957
