I bring online projects to life!

Working for the SVP for Strategy, I led an initiative to explore new ways to inspire, encourage and empower volunteers to raise money and promote Habitat's work through social media.

• Developed a strategy for experimenting with social-fundraising with the volunteer Global Village program.
• Designed & managed development of WeAreHabitat.org - a social fundraising platform built with Drupal on a tight budget.
• Led recruitment of 100 volunteers across six trial teams and worked throughout the organization to help them raise three times more than traditional volunteers using the new tools.

This work is now being continued with dedicated Habitat staff.

FirstGiving is the US arm of the highly successful British business JustGiving. A 20 person business helping nonprofits raise over $40million per year. During this engagement, my accomplishments included :

• Leading a company-wide process to evaluate and then set the product strategy & roadmap for 2010.
• Introducing an agile development process and led it through two very successful product cycles.
• Team-organization including clarifying roles, hiring and removing staff.

UI Design / Front-end Engineering / Development Lead
We built ApexMD as a powerful search tool to help doctors find the most appropriate and available specialists within top medical centers. Targetted at physicians who need to make a referral, or patients who need a second opinion, ApexMD went far beyond the basic doctor lookup.

As a five person startup, I picked up many roles including the design and development of the UI and owning the product development roadmap. Other activities included included collating requirements, setting up an agile sprint cycle, version control system, bug tracking and managing testing.

ApexMD is now used accross a dozen medical centers including UCSF, CPMC, Stanford & Mayo Clinic

Projects were in association with Rocket Communications & NoDots

UX & Front-End Engineering
Trilliant sell networked metering technology to power companies.

Trilliant needed help developing UI flow & layouts for their 'Unity' product. I helped them refine their requirements, and then rapidly took them through a live-code prototyping process to figure out and test workflows and user-interface methods.

At experienceTHIS, we packaged and sold gift-certificates for experiences, such as spa-days, whale watching trips and even soviet jet flights.

I formulated the business plan, developed product packaging; hired (and paid for) four staff, grew channel partnerships with several Bay Area retailers and dozens of suppliers, built systems to manage online sales and distribution through retail outlets and sought additional investment.

Some hard-won lessons came out of this experience.

I started SFDebate in 2007 as a forum to encourage open debate around political issues. Based on the oxford-style of debate, the group meets every other week to discuss and debate topical issues. SFDebate was absorbed by the commonwealth club where you can still go to events today.

Next Event :

TBD

Intra.net was a collaborative platform for sharing corporate information; a forerunner of MS Sharepoint and a forerunner to wikis. We conceived the idea while building corporate intranets in Hong Kong. Over the next two years we moved to California and grew to over 100 people.

I was largely responsible for the strategic direction of the product, which included developing alliances with partners, marketing & public relations, and designing and positioning our offerings. I had the final say on technology solutions, and continued to work hands on to write technical white papers and build UI prototypes.

Through rapid release cycles, we leapfrogged our competitors to deliver an 'ASP' service localized for 12 different regions (including Asia), and made it available on wireless devices. Intra.net was sold in 2002 and the product continues live on today as 'Noodle'

I have a myriad of to-do lists and notes that I now need to synchronize between my laptop, phone, and iPad. I've looked at tools such as Evernote and OneNote, but their folder based, hierachial structure is too restrictive for my needs. I envision something that is more lightweight and better organized than google docs, hyperlinked like wikis, and can capture my interactions, tasks, thoughts and knowledge for the next 30 years.

I'm extending the PHP based Dokuwiki system through plugins and a HTML5/CSS3 template. I hope to contribute it back at least as open-source. Stay Tuned

This started with my need to find crew to sail with, or boats to sail on. Every weekend boats sit in the marina, because their owners can't find crew. Yet there are even more people out there looking for a ride. This problem is not limited to sailing... climbers, windsurfers, kayakers all struggle to form small groups for activites.

Meetup provides a great way for people to gather around common interests. But meetup's structure is hierachial.... group organizers put on events to a larger audience. Facebook groups also suffer from a similar issue. Early days on this too... the space is littered with failures and I still have a lot of customer research and market evaluation.