About
Just the Basics
My passions are travel and web technology.
Background
I was born and raised in Chicago and studied Electrical Engineering at Southern Illinois University. After college I worked for a short time as a software engineer writing assembly language code, then moved into technology-related sales & marketing.
I have been working with multimedia and the internet since the early 1990’s. In 1993 I formed a company in Chicago called “InterAction Multimedia” which later became “FX Multimedia” InterAction / FX was one of the first companies in Chicago providing web development services and we did some amazing work evangelizing the web in the days before the boom caught on. (I think I surfed the entire World Wide Web the first day I tried Mosaic 0.9 alpha–but at that time, there were only 200 websites!)
In 1997 I cashed out and decided to take a sabbatical and focus on my other passions: travel and photography. I launched one of the earliest blogs on the Net and quite possibly the first real-time travelblog “Travelog.net” which garnered international media attention. (Sadly, I failed to re-register the domain and lost it, but I have posted an archive of travelog.net on this site.) Crude as Travelog.net looks to today’s more refined eye, it was groundbreaking at the time.
After travelling for a year, I got the itch to go back into business. I spent 3 years in Bangkok, Thailand developing an online travel guide which, much to my dismay, came tumbling down with the dot-com bust.
Post travel guide, I worked for several online travel-related companies including Concinnity Partners and Groople doing business development and online marketing.
In May of 2005 I decided that the the time was finally ripe for a really kick-butt community-driven online travel guide–that’s what I am working on again.
Most recently, I helped bring Barcamp to Bangkok.
