EXPERIENCE Google. New York, NY. Product Manager. May 2005 - present. Overseeing the day-to-day growth, development and vision for dodgeball.com. (see below) Dodgeball.com. New York, NY. Founder / Lead Developer. 2000 - May 2005. Dodgeball is all about using technology to bring people together. The dodgeball service encourages users to use text messaging on the mobile phone to opt-in with their location (e.g. send "@ Luna Lounge" to nyc@dodgeball.com). Once the service knows where you are, it can then to broadcast your whereabouts to friends, look for nearby friends-of-friends or hook up with nearby crushes. The product combines location-based services with social software on mobile devices. We often say the combination of the three leads to technology that facilitates serendipity. The idea for dodgeball came in the fall of 2001 as friends were either switching jobs or entering the land of the unemployed after the dot-com heydays. For three years the service was used by a handful of friends to keep in touch with old co-workers. Once re-launched in April 2004, using text messaging as the primary vehicle for interaction, the service finally became sticky. Today dodgeball spans across 22 US cities with close to 20k users who are generating thousands of messages nightly. Dodgeball has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Good Morning America, Wired, Time, Newsweek, etc. and, more interestingly, has spawned an entire breed of conceptually similar Mobile Social Software (MoSoSo) applications that are both spreading awareness and driving demand for these types of applications. Dodgeball was acquired by Google in May 2005. For more information, please see: http://www.dodgeball.com New York University. New York, NY. Adjunct Professor. Spring 2005 + Spring 2006. In December of 2004, I was invited to teach at class NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program, the graduate program I had completed just a few months beforehand. The administration asked me to "teach the class you wished you could have taken while at ITP". That invitation became "Ubiquitous Computing for Mobile Devices", a 14-week class focused on taking the concepts found in emerging mobile technologies and retrofitting them to work on ubiquitous platforms. Sixteen students worked on everything from musical compositions based on ringtones to remote-controlled installation art to services that can help you find your way around the city or figure out what to buy at the grocery store. Highlights from the class include "Blockies" (mobile phone grafitti), "Cellphedia" (a mobile version of wikipedia), and "SubAlerts" (a location-aware subway schedule notification system), which have been featured in Wired, Tech TV, and CNN. The course syllabus can be found at: http://ubiquitylabs.com/itp/ ConQwest. New York, NY. Technical Lead. Fall 2004 ConQwest is an example of a "Big Urban Game" - an exercise in what happens when the concepts of game design are moved off the game board or computer monitor and into the real world. SS+K, an advertising agency in downtown NYC, was working with Qwest Wireless to design a game that would be both engaging to play and would highlight the technology of their handsets. They had settled on using "semacodes" - 2D barcodes readable by camera phones - as a key element in the game design. The problem was that most US phones (Qwest's phones included) are not sophisticated enough to run the Java software required to decode semacodes I was brought on to help make semacodes work on the devices that people carry in their pockets today. The solution was to move the processing off the device and onto the network, using text and photo messaging as a vehicle to get data in and out of the system. The result was a game that was half treasure hunt, half foot race, played throughout the city streets of 5 US cities. In each city, five teams of high school students were invited to scour the city in search of semacodes. When shot with a camera phone, these semacodes either unlocked points or secret clues. The kids loved it, and ConQwest 2005 (the sequel) is currently being played in 5 additional markets across the US. For more information, see: http://homepages.nyu.edu/~dc788/conqwest PacManhattan. New York, NY. Game Co-Designer. April 2004. PacManhattan was a life-size game of Pac Man played out in the city grid surrounding Washington Square Park in downtown New York City. Players in the street compete in an athletic contest while given direction by "controllers" - participants in a central control room with a bird's eye view of the game. Cell phones were used to report location while software was used to track relative player positions. PacManhattan has since become the de facto example of a "Big Urban Game" and also serves as a prime example how to making interesting things happen (geo-location tracking game players, real time game updates) using lowest-common denominator technology. For more information, see: http://www.pacmanhattan.com MTV Networks. New York, NY. May 2003 - September 2003: Wireless Product Development * Developed Txt2TRL, MTV's first live, on-air text-messaging application allowing viewers at home to interact with the host/guests of TRL from their mobile phones. * Designed and managed the planning and launch of three SMS-based games: "Fanagram", "Yearbook Trivia" and "Rock Paper Shizzle". * Managed launch of the MTV ringtone store for both MTV.com and *MTV on mobile phones. * Wireframed both MTV's future mobile community and mobile/on-air integration efforts. Vindigo. New York, NY. August 2000 - July 2001: Product Development. * Shaped user experience of WAP-enabled products (for phone.com and Nokia browsers). * Defined UI, new features and functionality changes for both Palm OS and WAP products. * Migrated the user experience of Palm OS products to Microsoft's PocketPC platform. EDUCATION New York University, Interactive Telecommunications Program. [more] M.P.S. May 2004. Syracuse University, S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. Bachelor of Science, Advertising. May 1998. |
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last updated: June 14, 2006