Mark's CV and Clients

Village Hope

Micro lending is one powerful tool in the fight against poverty.  You may have heard of microloan banks in India...but there is a group doing great work in Uganda.  VillageHopeCore  is doing some fine work, and I was happy to be able to lend a hand with their web site.

Willie Nelson and Farm Aid

The logistics behind the first Farm Aid show in champagne Illinois were massively complex. We successfully used an online service called The Source to help with the following:

By 1984, we were blazing along at 2400 baud, and the cost of online time had plummeted to about $25.00 per hour.

• Coordinate with over 90 performers, their agents, lawyers, and tour managers. Of these 90, there were over 70 who were already on tour. This meant that their schedules had to be timed down to the hour. It also meant that we had to:
  
  
  
  • Park over 300 tour buses
    
  • Provide over 700 hotel rooms
    
  • Review and sign performance contracts.
    
  
  
• Feed the press with updates on performers, philosophy, and concert events.
  

It's possible that we could have done it without the online component, but I'd rather not even think about that. We used this same system to produce versions II and III of the show.

Neil Young

In the heyday of large music concerts, a little known fact was that all show production expenses, and payments were made in cash. This posed obvious bookkeeping problems which were made more odious when the tour went to Europe and the fact of currency regulations kicked in.

In these days, we communicated at a blazing 300 baud, and the cost of daytime connectivity was almost $300.00 per hour. Despite it all, this systems saved thousands of dollars.

Neil was planning a European tour, and wanted an easy way to control the inefficiencies of a large scale cash business. To be more precise, his accountants insisted on a solution.

We opened an account with Dialcom, and distributed workslates to the pertinent members of the tour. These workslates had a built in modem, and a 16 line display with a chicklet keyboard, but they did the job.

A key ingredient to success was the pedal steel guitar player who was responsible for nightly merchandise settlements. He was a country boy in every sense of the word, and training was not going well.

One day I discovered that the Dialcom system had a gateway to the future trading system, and when Ben discovered that he could check hog futures online, training was over!

The success of this system carried over to another effort. In 1984, Neil joined Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp to produce the first Farm Aid show

Sanako

Sanako builds language laboratories and software all over the world.  Their customer base spans literally every time zone on earth.

In 2002 I met with the CEO of the company to discuss how a community site might bridge some of the problems associated with such a diverse, and dispersed, client base.  In operation since 2003, the discussion forums have become a central piece of the customer/product support strategy of the company.

Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores

The company operates over five hundred restaurant/gift shops throughout the U.S.. As the company grew, it became more difficult for the founder to stay in touch with the hourly employees.

He knew that this is where the rubber meets the road, and wanted a way to be able to get direct unfiltered opinions and observations from the hourly employees.

EcoTone was contracted to build a site to make this possible, and Barreltalk was born. From a test group of fifteen members in 2001, it has grown to over 15,000 members, and become a valuable tool allowing for previously impossible interactions between the home office and the field.