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I Build A Robot... Sort Of
I build a robot out of cookie tins and "tiny computers". 23 years later I'll end up writing a rock opera about robots. -
First Computer
Spent the summer paving driveways to purchase this gorgeous Atari 400. -
First Mac
The beginning of a very long and expensive love/hate relationship. I'm guessing I've spent somewhere in the neighborhood of $25k in almost 25 years. Had I put all of that cash in Apple stock, I wouldn't need to be pimping my resume online. -
Berklee College of Music
I attend the Berklee College of Music. I major in composition and discover that writing music is very much like writing procedural code. -
Dukakis/Bentson Presidential Campaign
I took a semester off to sit alone in a closet in Boston for almost a year with a telex machine monitoring the newswire for the 1988 presidential campaign. We lost the election, and 4 years later I will fail at an attempt to get on the ballot for the congressional race in the 12th district of New Jersey. -
Flirting With The Law
I go to work for a law firm in NJ managing their archaic computers and billing systems. I manage to convince them to upgrade from DOS to Windows 3.1. Eventually I start doing some legal work for some really nasty criminals and take a few law classes at Fairleigh Dickinson University. I realize soon thereafter that a career in law is not for me. -
First Website
The Wayback Machine doesn't do the layout justice, but trust me when I say this is still one of the simplest, most effective websites I've ever been a part of creating. No nonsense information architecture, some PERL CGI and simple markup. Do you really need more than that? -
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First Startup
Everyone remembers their first. 80 hour weeks, desks made from doors and sawhorses, angry investors, fights over business models... We changed our name three times and changed our focus more times than I can remember. In the end the company settled on the name of Colloquis. Colloquis was sold to Microsoft in Q4 of 2006 -
SmarterChild Launches, Grows To Over 20M Users
SmarterChild was our first conversational automated agent at Colloquis (then ActiveBuddy). It became popular in the early 2000's, rising to over 8M users in the first year, and continued to be popular until its demise in May 2009. By November 2006, we had amassed 20M users on MSN Messenger alone. We never did win the Turing Award, though. -
I Write A Rock Opera... Sort Of
23 years after I build my first robot, I write, record, and perform a rock opera... about robots. Glam rock mega-stardom is fickle. -
I Join Musikube
Back when feature phones ruled the mobile landscape and premium SMS was making zillionaires out of some entrepreneurs I joined a company called Musikube. While I didn't become one of those zillionairres, I did have the opportunity to develop some cutting edge mobile products using song and voice recognition technology. -
More Mobile With mSmart
At mSmart we built a platform for advertisers and businesses to easily deploy SMS and MMS programs. The writing is on the wall though. Rumor has it that Apple is coming out with something soon that will usher in a new era of mobile madness. -
Building A Telescope
Since I was a kid I always wanted to build my own telescope from scratch. So I finally did. -
I join Schematic
I decide to go back to my agency roots and join Schematic. I am naive enough to think that the digital agency business has matured since the mid/late 90's. It hadn't, but despite that I meet amazingly talented people and together we build some incredible things! -
2008 Beijing Summer Olympics
NBC 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics Silverlight Video Player During the 17 days of the 2008 Olympics Games in Beijing, the NBCOlympics.com video player, which we built at Schematic, had more than 50 million unique visitors, resulting in 1.3 billion page views, 70 million video streams and 600 million minutes of video watched, increasing the average time on the site (from 3 minutes to 27 minutes) and Silverlight market penetration in the U.S. by more than 30%. -
Nokia Ovi Store Launches
Number 2 isn't so bad. Apple owns the app store space, and the Android Marketplace is growing fast. For now, though, Nokia's Ovi store is still the second largest mobile application store in the world. Architected and built from the ground up by my team at Schematic (along with developers from 3 other offices), the Ovi store hit 1M downloads a day shortly after launch, and has continued to grow ever since. -
Schematic Touch Wall Debuts in Cannes
With over 24M media impressions, the Cannes Lion Touch Wall was easily one of Schematic's highest profile projects ever. The multiuser, multitouch wall boasted a 12' by 5' sheet of glass, 6.14 million pixels, six short-throw projectors, three RFID antennae, a bunch of lasers and some very clever software engineered by Schematic's technology team. -
FreshDirect iPhone App Launches
FreshDirect is a beloved New York institution. When they approached us to create a highly transactional iPhone app, we couldn't resist. We built an experience for them that cut down on the number of dropped carts, included 90% of the functionality on their website, and satisfied their customers cravings to be able to order their groceries on-the-go. -
Betty Crocker iPad App Launches
We took Betty's trusted brand and brought her into the 21st Century with enough food porn to make Steve Jobs blush! Developing on a platform that hadn't even been released yet was a challenge, and we made some mistakes along the way, but it all paid off in the end. The Schematic built Betty Crocker app was ranked #1 on the free app best-sellers chart, above Netflix and WebMD, in its first week available in the iTunes store! -
Smirnoff Nightlife Exchange
14 countries signed on for the <a href="http://bit.ly/gLaqU1" target="new">Nightlife Exchange Project</a> and packed their favorite nightlife culture - all chosen by their Facebook fans - into a crate, and shipped it off to their partner country for a giant <a href='http://bit.ly/ft0NxJ' target="new">global party</a>
