I'm in the process of setting up a new home online and this is one of those nutshell autobiographies that as of summer 2007 leads up to the present where you find me in a transitional stage. I'm working on an idea for a new company and service that's taking up all of my imagination and energy (a leeetle bit on that below). Lots missing, but isn't there always, and sometimes isn't it nicer that way?
The short story goes: I was born in Hackettstown, NJ in 1981, grew up in the even more rural Blairstown, NJ, and (1, 2, skip a few) dropped out of Blair Academy high school with a head full of my own ideas and went to art school. After graduating from Montclair State University with a BFA in video and mixed-media (if I were born 5 years earlier I would have positively disappeared into YouTube) I moved to Portland, OR for a year to read books, watch movies, draw pictures, work terrible jobs, and discover the interweb. From there, all fired up on Ray Kurzweil, I moved to Houston, TX for the Studies of the Future graduate program at the University of Houston-Clear Lake where I earned an MS in 2004 with a focus on the future of video games, virtual worlds, and the geospatial web. My next stop was Los Angeles to work with John Smart and the Acceleration Studies Foundation where I helped organize the 2004 and 2005 Accelerating Change conferences at Stanford. Midway through 2005 I moved to Brooklyn, NY and from December 2005 until June 2007 I was Resident Futurist with The Electric Sheep Company as it grew from 3 people to over 60.
I've spoken at way too many conferences including GDC, Where 2.0, Supernova, Serious Games Summit, Tribeca Film Festival, and Virtual Worlds 2007, to suriously name just a few. I also co-founded a couple: the Second Life Community Convention in 2005 and the Metaverse Roadmap Summit in 2006, out of which I researched and co-authored the first Metaverse Roadmap foresight report with John Smart and Jamais Cascio through the Acceleration Studies Foundation. I also started and run the NY Metaverse Meetup and get interviewed quite a bit and have been on TV and done all that stuff. Yadda yadda, fun fun.
All
this says a little and a lot about me, but mostly just that I've been
out there doing and creating and learning about interesting and
sometimes important things with interesting and sometimes important
people (yea, everyone's important but you know what I mean: people
you've *heard* of ... if you roll a certain way :). You can see all my
contact information and various homes around the web like Facebook and
Second Life and Flickr and Last.fm on my onXiam profile. I'm currently working to assemble a small team and write a business plan for a service that combines passive gaming, lifestreaming, and collaborative web browsing
with virtual world elements. If this is of interest to you, please feel
free to get in touch through jerryp[at]gmail[dot]com. I'm still feeling
everything out and looking for resources. Yes, Virginia, there is a
business model. How about that? I'm as surprised as you are.
Also, I recently had an art show in Manhattan and Second Life with my roommate Christian, and I have a beard now, which improves my intelligence and dashingness +5 and means I'm very serious.
