In two words, I am a technology entrepreneur. And consultant. (Damn, that’s four words.)
I love technology and start-ups and “translating” between the business side and the technology side. That is what I have spent the last 14 years doing.
My background is a mix of software engineering and the various facets of running a technology business. Over the years my roles have included Sales, Marketing, Product Development, Evangelism (technology and secular that is, not religious, although at times it does get pretty heated…) and fund raising (the venture capital kind, not the NPR kind)
I am the founder and Chief Bottle Washer of blurgl, Inc. a consulting company that provides my CTO For Hire services to companies primarily in the areas of learning, collaboration and content management technology. You can learn more about the consulting services we provide on the “About blurgl, Inc.” page.
Prior to blurgl, I spent over a decade as a board member and Chief Technology Officer of WBT Systems, an enterprise e-Learning software company based in Waltham, Massachusetts, and Dublin, Ireland that I co-founded in 1995.
I wrote the original prototypes of the TopClass Learning Content Management System and together with my co-founder and friend Eamonn Webster, we built an award winning product that we are very proud of.
- TopClass has been used by millions of learners in a dozen languages and over 20 countries.
- It included one of the earliest dynamic Learning Object architectures that allowed automated, truly personalized learning.
- We were one of the earliest proponents of collaboration as a integral part of the online learning process, including those capabilities in the product from Day One.
[The above is probably more than you ever wanted to know, but like I said, we're proud of what we did.]
My primary roles were promoting the strategic benefits of e-Learning (and of course the company and its products), as well as managing the long term product roadmap. I had the opportunity to work with a diverse group of clients from CEOs on down and from Fortune 500 companies and across the spectrum to smaller organizations with less than 10 people. My role also allowed me to work with industry analysts, journalists and other vendors as well as to speak regularly at conferences on e-learning strategy and technology.
We sold the company to Horizon Technology Group in early 2006 and other than an occasional bit of consulting (and having many good friends there), I no longer have any involvement in WBT.
Before WBT (which seems like a really long time ago), I was a software engineer and researcher in high-speed networking, distributed learning, and software analysis and design. As a student, I wrote accounting software for Mac OS (which was more exciting than it sounds, mainly because I worked for a great guy who gave me an early break and introduced me to Macintosh) and I even bummed around in Southern California for a while.
When asked (yes, it does happen, don’t be smart) I have described myself as an information junkie, an unabashed Apple bigot, an on-and-off practitioner of aikido ("origami with people instead of paper"), a private pilot, and a big fan of parentheses.
I was born in Dublin, Ireland, where I also went to school, getting a Computer Science degree from University College Dublin. I currently live just outside Boston, Massachusetts, with my wife (a very patient and understanding woman as you can imagine) and daughter and my home network of Macs, PCs,1 and Linux boxes. And my ReplayTV. I love my ReplayTV.
1 Thanks to the move by Apple to Intel processors and those extremely clever guys over at Parallels, I am now down to one lone, old PC laptop (for old times sake), which I hardly ever use, as I can do everything I need to (including Windows) on a Mac. You should get one. Seriously.
