Philinje

Notice

I am, at this point, an employee of the Wikimedia Foundation. My user name, Philinje, represents my personal account. That is, all edits that I make under this user name are made only in my individual, personal capacity as a volunteer, or otherwise regular member of the community. When I use this user name, I am not acting as an employee, representative, or agent of Wikimedia Foundation. To contact me in that role, please leave your message at m:User talk:Pchang.

Major documents edit

The following is a list of documents that I have been the primary author of while at the Wikimedia Foundation (in no particular order):

The following are data analysis reports that I helped refine or directed the development of:

Major epochs edit

Some people's lives travel down the same groove over many years. Mine hasn't.

At age 0 to 8 months, I was born in South Korea. But my parents were already living on the east coast and until age 18 I lived near Philadelphia and attended a prep school that was Quaker in origin. In the 7th grade I edited a Middle School newspaper and then in 9th grade I started a magazine of the arts called Shades of Gray with my dear friend Scott. We collected art of all kinds from contributors in many of the local schools. The printing costs were covered by donations.

From 18 to 38, I lived in northern California. While attending UC Berkeley, I continued the magazine as a nonprofit corporation and continued to publish it throughout my school years, and published the last issue in 1986. Also my undergraduate thesis was published not only in but "as" an issue. The goal of the magazine was to promote grassroots culture and provide an avenue of exposure for relatively unknown artists. By inference, the magazine argued that anyone could be an artist.

Strangely, self-publishing this magazine led to my career in technology. Thanks to the Macintosh, which first appeared on UC Berkeley campus in 1984, I began desktop publishing this magazine by using MacWrite and MacDraw, printing paper galleys on a daisywheel printer, and pasting things onto traditional layout boards. My techniques evolved as quickly as the desktop publishing revolution.

Eventually this led to journalistic activities in Mac graphics, and I realized early on that companies could design much better products if they understood what users really wanted to do, and how. The rest of this story is below.

Then for five years, I lived in the UK (mostly London and one year in Scotland).

Then for four years, I lived in Tokyo, married my wife and had a daughter.

Now, in 2011, I am back in northern California and joined WIkimedia Foundation as the Mobile Product Manager.

Career highlights edit

1988 - Editor of show page magazine, which explained PostScript technology to graphic designers
1989 - Marketing manager at Graphisoft, Hungarian developer of architectural CAD software
1990 - Product marketing and marketing communications at Paracomp, later Macromedia
1992 - Director of Marketing at StarNine Technologies, developer of email gateway software, acquired by Quarterdeck
1993 - PR and other roles at AT&T, including co-founder of the company's first e-commerce platform, SecureBuy
1996 - Co-founder and leader of e-Acumen, developer of energy trading risk analytics, after two failed beginnings
2002 - Mentor to startups and arts organizations in London
2004 - Interim CTO at Staellium, developer of StealthText, a service that delivered self-destruct text messages
2005 - Product Manager at Picsel Technologies, developer of mobile graphics technology and applications
2007 - Designed and deployed an embedded mobile web browser with Docomo and NEC in Japan for Picsel
2008 - Biz dev and product management for doubleTwist Corp, an iTunes alternative, in Japan and Asia
2010 - CEO of Sairis Group, developer of digital video technologies, in Japan
2011 - back to the Bay Area post-earthquake/tsunami/nuke disaster, Mobile Product Manager at Wikimedia Foundation

Phil Inje TALK