He watched Fahrenheit 9/11 and said, "This message should be broadcast in other languages."  Having led businesses from Peru to Hungary to Russia, he looked at the boom in Internet video and said, "Hey, everyone doesn't speak English!"  He watched crowd-sourcing sites like Wikipedia sites, and said, "Millions of people want to make a difference but don't know how." 

Michael Smolens put two and two together and created dotSub.  The idea is as simple as it is innovative -- upload a video, allow the masses to translate it (wiki-style), and rendered a subtitled video for viewers to watch.  Stay tuned, KarmaTubers. Our own Seva Cafe video, for example, can be seen with French subtitles. :)

Yesterday we met in Berkeley.  Lance -- who was one of the earliest bloggers on the Internet and worked for Davos -- and Berkeley B-school student, Hitesh, joined the party.  As Michael went to feed the parking meter, he ran into Mary Hodder, founder of Dabble.com (which indexes over 13 million videos on the web), who skipped her "spin class" to engage in our conversation.

It was a great time, talking with industry insiders.

Outside of realizing that Lance and Michael are hard-core tennis players and that Mary had been tagged with a smile-card "a year or two" back, we all had a great time!  (And yes, everyone was loaded up with more smile cards).

From the airport, Michael writes back:  "All I can say is wow.  Our karmic meeting is going to be very important for me and dotSUB. Only time will tell in what way.  All I can thank is rich Henry for this meeting."

I still don't know who "rich Henry" is, but I echo the power of serendipity. :)