Hi there! My name is Loren, and you’ve found my blog. Congratulations! I hope it is everything you dreamed it would be.
I’m a serial entrepreneur in Midtown Atlanta, and I focus on rich web experiences and technologies. I’ve been most recently excited by the prospects of social media, web video, cloud computing, and the rapid-development languages and frameworks which help us leverage these things.
I am active both as an entrepreneur working to pursue my own goals, and as a member of the local entrepreneurial community helping to legitimize and reinforce Atlanta’s rich social network of smart, driven individuals.
If you want to know what I’m doing right now or you’d like to interact with me, you should follow me on Twitter.
If you’d like to connect with me in a more professional capacity, you should check out my LinkedIn profile.
Recent companies, groups, and projects:
Atlanta Flex and Actionscript Coders Meetup When we decided to write VideoCrush.com, I had to learn Flex to code up the video messaging magic. In short order, I found that Flex skills were in high demand, even with the startup crowd. Having just learned the platform myself, I saw a need for a user group in the Midtown area where hackers could write code with other hackers. Along with a handful other local community enthusiasts, I helped found this grassroots coders meetup and we held its first meeting on November 5th.
Tourbuzz is “an ideal solution for independent virtual tour photographers that want to deliver the best quality virtual tour possible.” I’ve been working as a Flex and Actionscript contractor to upgrade the Tourbuzz virtual tour player, and the results are stunning. We’ve seamlessly integrated still photos, partial and full panoramas, soundtracks and voiceovers, floor plans, and even video to deliver the most stunning web virtual tour platform available.
StartAtlanta.org StartAtlanta was created to address a serious problem in Atlanta: our best and brightest entrepreneurs aren’t incentivized to stay! The events surrounding the Appcelerator move spurred an excellent discussion between entrepreneurs and investors. As a result, a dozen or so of us entrepreneurs got together and created StartAtlanta as a non-profit focal point for Atlanta’s burgeoning startup scene to connect with each other, share knowledge and resources, form teams, and even get funding.
VideoCrush started down the path to pioneering a number of things on the internet. First and foremost, it was to be the world’s first video-only dating site, with all social interactions consisting of some form of video (ie no text posts, messages, comments of any kind.) To achieve this, I spent many long hours researching and implementing the technology required to make it happen, from the media capabilities of Flex/Actionscript, to the infrastructure scalability of Amazon Web Services (aka cloud computing.) The technology proof-of-concept was complete, but we didn’t make it to launch before we ran out of runway, unfortunately. Such is the life of a startup!
Snowcap Labs Web marketing at its finest! Offering market research, paid search, SEO services, and viral marketing campaigns, Snowcap Labs can help your company or startup get in front of the people who need you most… or save you big marketing dollars avoiding markets where you don’t belong! Never brave the fickle seas of web traffic alone again.
Ben-Hur Investments An investment club consisting of eleven enterprising twenty-somethings looking to “learn by doing” about stock investing. Dues are raised monthly, educational presentations are given by the club members, “guest investors” are invited to speak to the club, and there is a monthly stock presentation series which the users then vote on and a make a purchase. Our current portfolio and history can be viewed on the blog.
Camura.com This is a social site we created for publicly sharing live images from your mobile phone. I helped build this site with a couple of friends as a hobby over the past 3 years. The site has grown to more than 300 registered users and over 10,000 visits a month. The site has never had a business model, but if you have any outstanding ideas…
Cingular Racing A “massively-single player” stock car racing simulation for mobile phones on the Cingular (now AT&T) network. Cingular Racing was revolutionary in many respects, especially for our small team working on it. For example, it was 3D at a very early time in the market, it pioneered the subscription model for mobile games, and it used a client-server multiplayer model that allowed users to compete without being online at the same time. (The massively-single player idea was inspired by Spore after I attended Will Wright’s demo unveiling the game for the first time.)