Check out some photos from this year’s Brazil Day San Diego, which took to PB’s streets on Sept. 8. The sixth annual festival brought South American flavor to the community. SEE PAGE 2. Want to know what’s next on the local calendar? Check out some upcoming events on PAGE 8.
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 2013 BEACHANDBAYPRESS.COM
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Extreme flow
GOING WITH THE FLOW Left, Marcus Richerson flips for points in the Flowboard Strapped Finals during the National Flowbarrel Championships at Belmont Park’s Wavehouse on Sept. 7. Richerson had an enthusiastic cheering section watching him perform. Below right, Brandon Stevens tears a stylish cutback, while (below left) Chris Childers does an off-the-lip spin during the Bodyboard Prone Finals.
ATHLETES CONVENED on Sept. 7 at the National Flowbarrel Championships at the WaveHouse at Belmont Park. Combining elements of surfing, bodyboarding and wake boarding, flowboarding involves surfing on artificial “wave sheets.” Boarders competed in open bodyboard, female flowbard and male flowboard divisions, with winners going on to compete for Team USA in the World Flowbarrel Championships in Abu Dhabi in October. Photos by DON BALCH
Groups propose ban on plastic bags A grassroots movement to protect marine wildlife by eliminating single-use plastic bags that can end up in oceans off San Diego and statewide gained traction recently with a news conference at SeaWorld. The popular marine park, which stopped using plastic bags in spring 2011, was an appropriate venue. “That one change to our business operation resulted in a reduction of one million bags per year that would have ended up in a landfill or worse, in the ocean,” said SeaWorld president John Reilly. Elected officials, business and civic leaders and environmentalists gathered Aug. 29 to
By DAVE SCHWAB
declare support for SB 405, a bill authored by state Sen. Alex Padilla (D-20th) to phase out single-use plastic bags in California, which is to be resubmitted in 2014. Padilla said he was at the conference to deliver two messages. “The first is a thank you to SeaWorld for leadership in voluntarily phasing out plastic bags, and the other is to call attention to our bill in Sacramento,” he said. Padilla noted more than 80 California cities and counties have voted to discontinue using
SEE BAGS >> PG. 5
SEA DEBRIS SeaWorld employee Jody Westburg holds up plastic refuse found in the ocean. Fishing lines and netting can be harmful to marine animals that may ingest or get caught in the debris. DAVE SCHWAB
Silicon Valley comes to the beach By KENDRA HARTMANN
UPSTART ENTREPRENEURS Kris Kibak, left, and Joey Rocco, founders of The Control Group, have made Pacific Beach the home of their tech startup. COURTESY PHOTO
Whatever the reputation of Pacific Beach — and that may change depending on who you ask — the reality is that the community has more than appears on the surface. The evidence is found in the headquarters of one of San Diego’s biggest technology startups, located right on Mission Boulevard. In late 2010, Joey Rocco and Kris Kibak founded The Control Group out of a small office in PB. Barely three years later, the company has grown exponentially, and now, operating out of a much larger (and expanding) office on Mission Boulevard, the company manages one of the largest people search engines in the world, instantcheckmate.com. Rocco and Kibak started instantcheckmate.com with online daters in mind. After extensive research into which sites were getting the most traffic, Kibak, who has considerable background in web marketing (he learned HTML when he was 12), realized online dating sites were a gold mine — and a potentially dangerous one to users. “So many people were starting to meet people online, but it can be so dangerous when you don’t know who you’re talking to,” Kibak said. “We wanted a way for people to figure out who they were talking to online, who’s living next door, who’s down the street.” Kibak’s intuition paid off. A few months after he and Rocco launched instantcheckmate.com, which offers background checks that include phone numbers, addresses, criminal history, census data and more, the story of Paul Wurtzel broke. Wurtzel was a registered sex offender who joined Match.com and preyed on women he made connections with, prompting one of his victims to launch a court case against the online dating giant. “We looked [Wurtzel] up on our site, and it showed he had a record as a sex offender,” Kibak said. “That’s the kind of thing we could prevent.”
SEE CONTROL GROUP >> PG. 5