Welcome to my personal place on the web. Here you will find all sort of information about me, mostly about my professional life, but also a few more personal facts. So lets start with the basics.

I was born and raised in South Africa. I emigrated in the early nineties to Switzerland, where I obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (better known as ETH). In 1996 I moved to California, and now I am happily working in Silicon Valley.

I've held research positions at the Digital Equipment Corporation Systems Research Center (which later became Compaq SRC) and also at AltaVista. In September 2000, I joined as director of application software REVERSi networks, a networking startup in Sunnyvale. The company went out of business after about a year with the meltdown in the optical networking space. I subsequently joined Vendavo, a price optimization company in Palo Alto, building Java-based enterprise software for Global Fortune 500 companies. In April of 2004 I joined Metreo, also in the same space, as member of the executive staff and chief software architect.

I am very proud of the fact that pricing software that I helped architect, design, build and deploy, are in daily use by a large number of corporations, many of them household names. It is hard to estimate how much money these companies have found in "pricing opportunities" using pricing analytical software and data visualization, but it is running in the $100's of millions of dollars. The impact that optimized pricing can have on a companies' bottom-line is truely staggering - unfortunately it is also a sensitive area for most companies, so most success stories are kept close to the chest.

My areas of interest are quite diverse - my computer science training is in user interfaces, but I've also been active in the area of Information Retrieval (in particular the intersection of IR and the World Wide Web), data mining, analytical databases, distributed algorithms, data visualization, and domain specific programming languages. My job gives me the opportunity to continuously learn - in recent years I've been developing high-speed OLAP systems and also rich-internet-applications (RIAs).