I create software products at various levels of abstraction — from low level coding to product management to M&A. Currently I'm the Director of Platform at Pearl.com (formerly JustAnswer), where you can pay to get high quality answers from certified experts.
I was a Co-founder and the CEO of Cucku, Inc. We made an outstanding peer-to-peer backup product called Cucku Backup. Sadly this fell foul of a patent dispute and we withdrew the product as part of a settlement. In addition to Cucku Backup we released an open source tool called StackHash which makes it easier for developers to work with data from Windows Error Reporting.
Before Cucku I worked at Macrovision, mostly in Product Management and Business Development roles. Macrovision doesn't exist anymore, it's now Rovi,
Flexera Software and part of Real Networks.
Earlier still I was lucky enough to spend time at two successful British startups. First at Verifier Systems where I wrote software for robotic semiconductor analysis including electrostatic discharge (ESD) and latch up testing. Verifier was acquired by Thermo Electron which is now Thermo Fisher Scientifc. Then at Ç-Dilla working on license management, copy protection and digital distribution. Ç-Dilla was acquired by Macrovision in 1999.
I have a BSc (Hons) in Cybernetics and Control Engineering from the University of Reading.
You can find more career detail on my LinkedIn profile.
For fun, I'm still pretty geeky. I publish various software tools, games and toys at Catfood Software and have several open source projects on CodePlex. I like to hike with a GPS and then write about it later — see my Hike Map. I also read too many books and have a script that pulls in my reviews.
I'm British but an army brat so I grew up all over the place. I've lived in San Francisco since 1999 and became a naturalized US citizen in 2010.
Contact
You can email me at rob@catfood.net, send a tweet to @abfo or try the network of your choice.