About:

OpenWonder is the private web consulting company for Michael Holland, a long-time internet product innovator. Check out my past companies or projects below...as well as projects I'm looking at now.

Prior projects & work:

Cornell University - 1992-1996

Worked with Cornell Information Technologies on some of the first web sites and on distributed software licensing
Founded Greekweb.com and World Famous Comics in 1994 as some of the first commercial web sites
Worked at Student Agencies , the largest student-run corporation in the country, as IT manager

Infonautics Corporation - 1996-2000

Infonautics was one of the first publicly traded internet companies, (NASD:INFO), founded to create cutting edge educational reference tools for individuals, schools and libraries. It paired a massive content database (similar to Lexis-Nexis) with amazing natural-language search technology.
Served as first product manager for Electric Library, the flagship consumer product, which had over 100K paid subscribers and was one of the top 5 subscription sites online at the time.
Created encyclopedia.com in 1997, the first free online encyclopedia. The system was one of the first SEO "landing sites" designed specifically to trap search engine spiders. Encyclopedia.com became one of Yahoo's Top 100 sites on the internet and still exists today.
Helped expand and grows Infonautics' use of HTML banner ads, which we pioneered in 1996 as way to drive users to Electric Library.
Co-founded and ran the free Sleuth Product line that started with Company Sleuth. This was one of the first internet "clipping" services that pulled information on publicly traded companies. Within 3 months of launch we uncovered and broke the news of the MCI-Worldcom merger, landing on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.
Ran sales team for online advertising for Infonautics including expanding out one of the first registration-offer advertising servers on the internet. Developed startup concept for taking the technology out as standalone startup.

DirectAdvice/Mellon Bank - 2000-2004

Joined as head of product management to expand their advanced rules and content management system that created finanial plans dynamically from an online interview process.
Setup and developed a full usability testing lab that watched how people completed complex financial forms. Worked with industry leader User Interface Engineering and other usability professionals leading to a patent in "progessive finanical planning".
DirectAdvice was bought by Mellon Bank (a customer) in the dot-com bust
Ran project to create multi-function service portal for Mellon Bank using web services from each group

Oberon Media - 2004-2008

Ran product management for the leading white-labeled desktop, web and mobile gaming platform Customers included Microsoft, Comcast, France Telcom and 100 other sites.
Developed one of the first social gaming platforms for Oberon including avatars, tokens, badges and SDK for multiple game developers to use platform.
Launched MSN Mobile, which was the first try-buy gaming delivery system that distributed games from dozens of developers onto hundreds of devices globally.
Devise and drove new traffic-driving marketing projects including GamesBar, a dynamic browser toolbar that had over 20M users.

SmartEquip - 2008-current

Led product and other business functions for the young business process network company
Expanded the "SmartEquip Network" into dozens of new partners and service areas as part of the growth of the leading support network in the construction/heavy equipment industry.

Current Projects:

Even though I'm working a lot, I'm always using OpenWonder to try out new technolgoies and see how I can use them to solve business problems. This has led me to spend lots of time looking at random fields from 3-d product rendering, telepresence and GIS systems. Current things I'm playing with are:

userexperience.info - wiki site for design patterns in user interface creation

placecast.com - stealth location product

CTTechMap.com - proof of concept using Google Fusion Tables

Other:

blog

Twitter: #shepholland