My newest venture in the works
Here is a long version of my resume, if I ever need to use one again I'll come up with a better format.
Minor new update,Oct. 2004 DaVinci Institute invited me to an event as one of Colorado's Most notable visionaries
due to proven history of failing to profit from it :-) but forseeing back before the internet went commercial (when everyone else was betting compuserve, prodigy, etc, were the wave of the future...) of how the internet evolved including everything from itunes,blogs, web2.0,net created internet encyclopedia ala wikipedia,ajax,viral marketing,amazon,google&google maps,affiliate marketing, collaborative filtering/recommendation systems,keyword and data mining targeted ads,...,before that a prototype electronic newspaper which would have allowed newspapers to be the portals into the internet instead of struggling to catch up... prior to that implementing a windowing system on the PC before Microsoft Windows existed (and doing overlapping rather than tiled windows 6 years before Microsoft was able to...) , Object oriented C before C++ existed, persistent objects before object DBs, netscape's business plan before they existed, various other biz and tech trends, etc... A bit of my history with the net further below, first 15 minutes of cyberspace fame...
To eventually profit from my ideas I needed to switch from shy visionary idea & tech type behind the scenes to being out in front making connections. On 8/7/2001 the Rocky Mountain News wrote a story about biz networking events, exaggerated perhaps but looks like i'm making progress changing and getting out from behind scenes and connecting in the biz world,noted here
"Yet, more often than not, you'll run into a true socializer, or at least someone with a lot of interesting things to say. Someone like Andy Casazza, the business development director of wireless incubator iSherpa.net, who has a handshake and a smile for everyone in the room. Or someone like Gigamind CEO Bryan Griffin, a quiet networking circuit veteran who knows more heavy hitters than most people can dream of."I'm busy at the moment doing a new startup, and haven't much time for the variety of interests I have. Intellectual interests span science,philosophy (western &eastern (eg taoism with western slant)), politics, econonomics, sociology, psychology, computers,nanotechnology,etc. Non-intellectual interests, some lapsed till I finish getting back in shape. let myself get out of shape, and gain extra weight i never had before, while with sedentary ex, now back in shape, weight gone. (for friends watching my progress back, upd 6/2001 finally in progress, upd 12/2001 up to 90 min a day, 5 days a week jog:-) slow :-),3/2002 up to 50 miles/week down 40 pounds, targeting Denver Marathon in Sept. 2002. oops, overdid it. overuse leg injury in april, had to switch to swimming, 3 days week 90 minutes crawl. down 50 pounds, close to finished. healed now and restarting jogging, marathon next year) some need to wait till I have more time to do: movies, reading, live or CD music of a variety of types (rock, blues,jazz fusion,celtic,classical/baroque,etc.),dancing, swimming, jogging, canoeing, kayaking (so far non-whitewater), camping, rafting, hiking, hangliding, skydiving, flying small planes (started, need to finish license), scuba diving,sailing,skiing, tai chi, etc.
Below are some libertarian writings I have sitting around. I decided not to go, but back in '94 the author of a new book on "cyber" libertarians asked me to go to a conference in SF to be on a panel with her after I'd debated her online a bit about flaws in some of her arguments (unfortunately my better writings weren't saved, just stuff done late at night when not awake).
first quick re: what the heck is a libertarian (since most people don't really know, or if they know the sound bite view don't know the reasoning behind its policies. it can require a bit of thinking when it runs counter to the status quo people aren't used to questioning or thinking about for themselves). It is essentially very close to the political philosophy of the founders of this country which most people don't truly understand anymore.
The best pamphelet soundbite intro to libertarianism is an LP leaflet here.
One practical reality inspiration for it is here.
It is based on the non initiation of force principle and tolerance for the peaceful views and actions of others. Adding to the importance of representative democracy a practical awareness to be on guard to empower the public against the dangers of the old saying that "democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner" (a reality which inspired creation of the Bill of Rights). . several nobel prize economic laureates like Milton Friedman are libertarian, or close (sometimes avoiding the word for pragmatic reasons). Its philosophy used to be called liberal in prior centuries but is very different from the modern american use of that word. So its also known as classical liberalism or market liberalism. The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank which is one of the most cited to think tanks in the country and most influential in washington even if they haven't yet enacted the ideas in legislation. Folks like Scott Mcnealy of Sun have served on its board (though he left when Cato refused to support the use of govt. power to take down his competitor microsoft. cato is consistent in its philosophy and not driven to pander to contributors). Its a positive philosophy appealing to many high tech people who are able to hear about it through the internet while the major parties monopolize mainstream media. There are different approaches to explain it to those coming from different backgrounds. The fulltext of one book is online which is written rationally in a way that may appeal to liberals, and those spiritually inclined (works also though those who aren't at all) is Healing Our World by Mary Ruwart, Phd. An intro by nobel peace prize nominees notes "Healing our World" is a rare book that challenges numerous aspects of conventional wisdom that we accept as axiomatically true. For example, a major dimension of this book is its linkage between our spiritual perspective and our economic well being. At first, these might seem like strange bedfellows, but Dr. Ruwart leads readers with her gentle touch to a world in which the interdependence of the hard sciences, social sciences, and spirituality become clear...")
They were written mostly late at night winding down from working long hours,mostly for informal use or on usenet so they could use some work. I do plan to polish them up a bit more some day since I think the points are useful. I tend to try to figure out ways to persuade people who are coming from different points of view (i.e., persuading a liberal might take different arguments than persuading a conservative). In the future there will be additions such as an explanation of why a libertarian approach would be better for the environment (despite some misconceptions of our viewpoints):
These were written by other people but I'd HTML'ized them for our BCLP web page, also in limbo at the moment since it was on marketplace.com:
The Internet did not reach mass market penetration in the 1980's due to a number of reasons, amongst them being that the average consumer didn't have: o a GUI's o cheap (or for that matter any) access to the Internet. o IP to the home. o a graphical web browser. .... Which left a single major barrier: $2/hour. This last and probably most crucial barrier went away literally during the course of a weekend when a Berkeley[no,Boulder] company called Cyberspace Development announced a revolutionary product: The Internet Adapter (TIA).
After failing to find funding for developing our own commercial browser and server in Setp/Oct. '93 (being too soon perhaps, netscape wasn't founded till the next summer '94), or other ideas others made billions off later (and some still secret paralleling what i'm about to do that were never done even though i figured big company would get a clue so it was too late, but apparently not...) that we changed course to bootstrap by contracting to set up stores on the internet (using web, and prior to the graphical web gaining widespread use, gopher and telnet). We posted to the net in November '93 announcing our company's existence (noted here by a net publication) and intention to start the mall, and the Boulder County Business Report did an article in December about us. After helping instigate the formation of the Colorado Internet Cooperative Association to get our net connection, we went online in January with our first customer, the Online BookStore, which was mentioned in the Feb. '94 Issue of Fortune magazine.
By February 94 our online content sales setup was mentioned in the Seybold Report
By March we had our picture on the cover of The Internet Letter newsletter (they haven't yet put that backissue online, so fair use excerpt) as part of a story on the new Internet Malls, with CSD being one of the four leaders in the field. There was an article in the Boulder Daily Camera also in March. We did a presentation at a Denver Internet conference, and I spoke on a panel about "Broadcast Television and the Information Highway" at a local NATAS (National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences) meeting with the general manager of the local PBS station among others.
I was asked to be on an Ask the Experts panel at the spring Internet World '94 in San Jose, but didn't make it at the last minute since I had too much work to do at the time, so I was still listed on the schedule. IW is the major internet industry trade show.
Cyberspace Development was written up in some of the early books about business on the internet, and gave talks at other local forums that year. To bolster company cash flow (being in the game early on where everyone wanted to know about the web but took a while to decide to spend money to actually have a web site when almost no one did), and intending to fund development of other internet software, I wrote a small product, The Internet Adapter, TIA, which was released in Aug. '94, and being purchased from all over the world within hours of release using an online vending setup (largely adapted from the existing vending setup I'd written). This was prior to the development of secure browsers so for anyone concerned about sending credit card numbers over the net an 800 number was setup with an automated system for users to touchtone in their credit card numbers securely.
In those days most people could only get access to the internet using text based software, sort of similar to needing to use DOS based text only programs, by dialing in to a unix computer. TIA effectively allowed users to turn in their DOS-equivalent software and use standard MS-Windows and Macintosh software, giving people the internet experience most people now take for granted, with some users praising it as having been the same experience for them as when the first Macintosh came out. Some users had no other way of getting real GUI net access. Some users who did have access to standard internet SLIP/PPP dialins to use this software already were paying charges like $3/hour and could trade in those accounts for cheaper, flat monthly fee accounts.
Adam Engst, respected industry visionary (ranked 2nd or 3rd most influenctial in mac industry) and author of the Internet Starter Kit books kicked off TIA by announcing it in his TidBits mailing list, saying "I realize this all sounds a bit like a Ginsu knife commercial (did I mention how TIA can cut beer cans too?), but if the reports I hear are true, TIA could seriously shake up the industry.", and then in his Internet Starter Kit books for Macintosh and Windows. (he actually makes the full text of the books available online). TIA has been mentioned in a variety of books on getting started on the net, and in several magazines including for example Wired, Internet World, .net, Online Access, MacWorld, MacUser, PC Computing, PC World, LAN Times, PCWeek, Seybold Report, etc., even various non-computer magazines like Extropy and an alternative rock magazine.
In the January 95 issue of Internet World on the Best and Worst of 94, Daniel Dern labeled TIA "Best new break-the-paradigm Internet software" .
We managed to get a short column, in Wired magazine which said that "TIA is as close to magic as a graphically deprived net.user can get" and before that a mention on their online HotWired site, and were for a decent time on Netscape's list of "What's Cool".
A larger article from Boardwatch March 95 about TIA and CSD. Not too many mistakes, aside from the fact that CSD wasn't founded for the purpose of doing TIA, that was a tangent.I got to speak at the main Berkeley Macintosh Users Group about TIA (Here was the TIA news about that), which was nice having been a long-time mac supporter starting with the original 128k. We had a newsgroup created initially just for our product, alt.dcom.slip-emulators
If TIA had been developed further (now off the market) after I sold the company it may have been adapted to perhaps become the software many small internet providers used still to access the internet, providing faster access than the current dialin accounts, (akin to Propel and similar internet accelerators since caching was considered) along with other benefits related to possible better ways to do child-safe filtering, etc, but the company chose not to do so, larger opportunities called. In many ways, TIA served its intended purpose of helping bring down the cost of net access to flat rate accounts and filling theniche of bringing people onto a user friendly net until ISPs and universities,etc., could make regular SLIP/PPP availible to more people .
The product wasn't marketed heavily, however through word of net mostly it sold three quarters of a million dollars or so in a little over a year (the product was later allowed to stagnate and die to free up time for other projects, despite potentialy huge $ markets for variants) . That may not be much but it represented hundreds of thousands of users, mostly sold using online vending machine automatically with no human involvement, just one press release and word of net, and this is despite the fact that the net was 1/20th the size it is today back in '94, most people weren't yet comfortable buying over the net, and it was tricky to get people to buy unix software in order to be able to run user friendly software on their home computer, etc., but it seemed to be the first real demonstration of selling commercial software as "cheapware" (ie, users had to pay after the free trial, wasn't like "shareware" where most users don't), in an automated online fashion over the net.
CSD was asked to give seminars on "Purchasing on the Internet" starting at the Dec '94 Internet World Conference (from the vendor perspective, ie the first ecommerce seminars at the one major tradeshow, for those who wanted users to be able to purchase their goods, in addition to future developments such as digital cash which still haven't arrived, should perhaps have been called "selling on the internet"). I didn't personally speak, but we were invited to organize the seminars based on our online commerce experience with TIA and with various vendors Cyberspace Development contracted to host on our marketplace.com server using custom ecommerce software
A user wrote a FAQ commenting about TIA, and thanks me in this ."Bryan Griffin did a wonderful job implementing TIA. But equally if not more important was his excellent support of his customers."
I left Cyberspace Development, selling out to my business partner, when it became clear the company wasn't going to provide a base to bootstrap into development of the projects I wanted to work on, among other reasons. It would have been interesting to see what would have happened if I had implemented an affiliate network sales setup for TIA as I'd planned (before Amazon.com existed, let alone could try to patent that obvious concept)
Since I've left CSD I have been pursuing more interesting, larger projects I won't talk about here, which will surface at some point.
A current TIA link that still works: from the virtual school
I was briefly involved with the Boulder Community Network, here is an old list of participants
TIA even entered the net lexicon, being listed in some glossaries