Karel M. Baloun
kbaloun@gmail.com
Lafayette, CA
OBJECTIVE
To build successful pro-environment, pro-social business such as "I Am Green" on social network platforms, making it easy to do good with your friends. To educate and protect commodity traders at PTrades.com. Continue to build social applications on my i2we platform. To educate and empower entrepreneurs on the social internet, following my book Inside Facebook.
Bio / Summary
Mr. Baloun architects and implements internet social applications. He created and owns over 70 Facebook applications, including I Am Green and I Am Mom, with over 1.1 million members all together. Recently at Facebook Inc, Mr. Baloun architected and managed development of site components as the first senior software engineer. His book "Inside Facebook" at FBbook.com, documents his year at the company and the state of the industry. An entrepreneur, Mr. Baloun created and owns a full featured commodity trading community site at PTrades.com. Earlier Mr. Baloun architected and lead development of the templating engine that still serves all of Looksmart.com and Findarticles.com. Fluent in Japanese, Mr. Baloun co-developed a Java wireless information server, and led trial installations at Toshiba and NTT Docomo. Mr. Baloun holds a Masters in Social Pschology from UC Santa Cruz. When not glued to his laptop, Karel loves nature, yoga, the occasional marathon, and travel with his family.
Recent Employment
i2we, inc. Berkeley, CA
(6/07 - present) Founder, CEO
Venture Funded startup. Best in the world at making communities of shared identity. Making it easy to do good with your friends. Over 225 application with over 1,500,000 members.
I Am Green, share with your friends what you can do for the Earth.
I Am X, see the full platform of 225+ apps.
PTrades.com, Silicon Valley
(5/06 - present) Founder, CEO
Designing and implementing a next generation social trading site for Futures. Seeking implementation, business and financing partners.
PTrades.com: The Community for free Futures paper trading.
Fantasy Futures Exchange: The Facebook Application Edition
mEgo.com, everywhere you go mEgo
(9/06 - 11/07) Architect
Responsible for delivering the technology, from database and backend servers upward. A beautiful vessel for your internet identity.
Author of "Inside Facebook", published 2006
Available at Amazon or whereever, and at Fbbook.com, is my completed book about Facebook and the social networking space.
- Specified an ideal social web platform
- Top listing for Facebook on Amazon
Facebook.com, Palo Alto, CA
(5/05 - 5/06) Senior
Software Engineer, Manager/Architect
Early stage engineer, architected some and developed across many areas of the site.
- Led a team of 9 engineers over 4 months in building the Places infrastructure
- Apache/APC/mysql performance profiling, analysis and optimization
- Contributed to development across most features of the site
LookSmart, Ltd., San Francisco, CA
(7/99 - 5/05) Senior Software Engineer.
Designed and implemented complex internet applications, designed databases, conducted statistical analyses, developed product specs and revenue data models.
- Co-architected a full featured templating, customization and site delivery system in PHP; implemented most major modules. This PageComp platform continues to serve all of Looksmart's web properties.
- Lead engineer on findarticles.com, serving 8m free publication articles
- Company's technical expert on Search Engine Optimization
- Designed and built campaign planning tools, including a full prototype of the looklistings 2.0 pricing engine, and sales tools to estimate keyword volume.
- Migrated 200,000 Looksmart email users to a new authentication platform and user database.
Prior work with Oracle, Geoworks/Toshiba/DoCoMo, HAL/Fujitsu
Education
University of California, Santa Cruz
M.S. in Social Psychology. (1996)
Focus on statistics, cross-cultural communication and computer modeling.
Macalester College, St. Paul, MN
B.A. with Honors, Psychology and Japan Studies (1994)
Extensive additional coursework in Computer Science, Mathematics and Economics.
International Christian University, Tokyo, Japan
Studied Chinese and Economics, most course work in Japanese. (1993)
Key Skills and Experience
- 10 years of web applications and server development experience.
- Experience with highly scalable web services
- Proficient in OO architecture and development in PHP, perl and Java, on various apache configurations.
- Proficient in web application architecture and backend development, some front end ability with XML, XSLT, CSS, javascript/AJAX.
- Asian Language Localization and Internationalization experience.
- 8 years database experience.
- Data warehousing, web site deliver, and transaction processing with Mysql and Oracle v7-9
- Expertise in ER design, performance tuning, triggers, stored procedures, clusters.
- 3 years Oracle DBA, almost an "Oracle Certified Professional".
- Statistical and financial analyses in SAS, SQL, PL/SQL,Oracle Financial Analyzer.
- Multidimensional database experience with Oracle Express. ODBMS experience in Versant.
- Sysadmin experience under Solaris and Linux
- Some knowledge of TCP/IP, HTTP, FTP, SMS, SMTP/POP3 protocols.
- Languages: English and Czech: native. Japanese:
excellent. Some Mandarin, Spanish, German. 1st Place: National Japanese
Language Speech Contest, Washington D.C., 1994
- Excellent communication and management skills
- Product Manager and Sales Support experience.