SPUG: Tony Bowden Rendezvous, May 25-28

Tim Maher/CONSULTIX tim at consultix-inc.com
Thu May 17 15:58:31 CDT 2001


SPUGsters,

Tony Bowden, of BlackStar.co.uk and Belfast.pm, and also one of
Damian's Senior Bosses 8-}, will be visiting Seattle next weekend,
and is interested in meeting up for drinks, dinner, and possibly
Folklife attendance with members of our group.

I'll probably be unable to participate myself, and am currently
swamped with other duties, so I'd like some interested person to
step forward as "party coordinator" and see what can be arranged
to make Tony feel welcome while he's here.  I've attached some
comments from him that will shed some more light on who he is
and what he does.

-Tim
========================================================
|  Tim Maher, Ph.D.             Tel: (206) 781-UNIX    |
|  SPUG Founder & Leader      Email: spug at halcyon.com  |
|  Seattle Perl Users Group    HTTP: seattleperl.com   |
========================================================

> Tell me what evenings or days you'd be available for some kind
> of rendezvous, and I'll see what I can arrange.  

Well, I arrive from Boston around 6:30 Thursday evening, so unless
there's no other alternative I'd prefer it not to be that evening. 
Then I fly out again on Monday at 5:15pm. At the minute any time 
at all between those is free ;)

I was one of the founders of BlackStar.co.uk, Europe's largest on-line
video and DVD store, with revenues in excess of $1m per month. Our systems
were all developed completely in-house on an open-source platform - Linux,
Apache, MySQL and Perl. All systems are home-grown and developed entirely
in Perl - the site, stock-control, customer management, fraud-detection
etc. Our VCs weren't very into the idea of releasing source code, so
we've contributed back to the Perl Universe by sponsorship - being a lead
sponsor of YAPC Europe last year, and contributing half the grant for
Damian Conway's 'Year of Perl'. We're also active in the 'Perl Quality'
world, currently employing Mike Schwern, the Perl QA chair.

I'm also the founder of Belfast.pm, which started off being solely
BlackStar employees, but has grown considerably over the last few months.

I'm currently stepping back from being involved full-time with BlackStar,
and trying to use the BlackStar story as an case-study to convince the
wider business world of the joys of Open Source!

Tony
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Tony Bowden | tony at tmtm.com | http://www.tmtm.com/

 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
     POST TO: spug-list at pm.org       PROBLEMS: owner-spug-list at pm.org
      Subscriptions; Email to majordomo at pm.org:  ACTION  LIST  EMAIL
  Replace ACTION by subscribe or unsubscribe, EMAIL by your Email-address
 For daily traffic, use spug-list for LIST ;  for weekly, spug-list-digest
  Seattle Perl Users Group (SPUG) Home Page: http://www.halcyon.com/spug/





More information about the spug-list mailing list