Business Interests
I'm an early stage investor in Poken and have joined as part-time CIO.
I'm running a small team doing research and development on web technologies. Areas we are looking at include Firefox (and IE) extensions and affiliate/search/VRM solutions.
I spent most of 1999 to 2007 co-founding and running buy.at as CTO. It started as a free web service called rename.net but we built a performance-based ad network to help us market our services and this was so sucessful it became the main business. I started from my attic in Geneva but now buy.at is based in the UK with offices in London and Newcastle. Buy.at was VC funded with the last round from DFJ Esprit in 2006 and was sold to AOL at the beginning of 2008.
Technical Skills
I have 20 years experience in building and running Unix networks. I have focused on highly-available and cost-effective Unix/Linux Internet/web infrastructures using predominantly opensource software. I have worked for my own and other start-ups, freelance for multinationals (BP, SGI, Reuters), public sector/international organisations (European Commission, ISO), banks and ISPs/ASPs.
My technical skills include Unix/Linux systems administration, Perl and PHP programming and MySQL database administration and performance tuning.
Other Things
I designed Space Cubes a few years ago and have been involved in commercialising them. In 1998 the spacecubes.com web site was state of the art and won the web3d.org award for the best commercial use of 3d on the web.
The Swissmad puzzle is based on one of my designs. It's made to a high quality in Switzerland.