Matt Mower

Current

• Wheel tapper at reeplay.it

Past

• Developer at Cominded
• Product Manager at PAOGA Ltd.
• Technical Marketing at PAOGA Ltd.

• Founder at Novissio Ltd.
• Partner at Evectors Software
• Technical Consultant at Hipbone Inc.
• Development Manager at Metadyne Ltd.
• Senior Intranet Developer at University of North London

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Education

• London Metropolitan University
• University of North London

Recommended

6 people have recommended Matt

Connections

141 connections

Industry

Computer Software

Websites

• My Website
• My Blog
• My RSS feed

Matt Mower’s Summary

I am, first and foremost, someone who loves building and selling products. Although I love the technology and getting my hands dirty writing code, I also enjoy working on marketing and selling products I am involved with. This means I have to work with products I love.

I have extensive development experience going back a decade and spanning a range of languages, paradigms, frameworks. At the moment I am committed to the Ruby language and the Rails framework (for web development) and the Objective-C language and Cocoa framewor (for MacOSX development). I love Ruby and I love MacOSX.

When it comes to software and systems there isn't a lot I haven't done at some point. I can't say I love system admin but in startups I usually do that as well unless someone else is champing at the bit (I wish!)

Over the last 5 years I have blended development with considerable experience of product management and strategic marketing. I like to work closely with marketing professionals and think I bring a unique blend of technical and product understanding to what they do. I have developed business propositions, run workshops, and presented to both technical and non-technical audiences.

I like to be involved in the early stages of product development and help take the initial idea through to a working prototype and on to full-scale implementation. Most recently I am doing this at reeplay.it and we're almost ready to launch our beta.

For a more in-depth view of the kind of person I am and whether you'd enjoy working with me please take a look at my weblog: "Curiouser and Curiouser!" (http://matt.blogs.it/). Please don't be put off by the politics: I will try and change your mind but have not resorted to brainwashing techniques so far!

Matt Mower’s Specialties:

ruby development, rails development, web development, rest, macosx development, blogging, knowledge management, privacy, social software, product management, strategic marketing

Matt Mower’s Experience

• Wheel tapper

  reeplay.it

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)

  September 2007 — Present (1 year 4 months)

  Principal developer of an exciting new Ruby on Rails application. We're nearly ready to launch, watch this space...

• Developer

  Cominded

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)

  November 2006 — August 2007 (10 months)

  Worked on the pre-beta development & deployment strategy for a social software application built using the Ruby on Rails framework. A great opportunity to turn my interest in ruby and building Rails applications into practical experience. I developed a number of front and back-end features.
  
  Five key insights from my experience were:
  
  1) The rails framework is an excellent basis but has it's own specific disciplines that must be learned and adhered to.
  
  2) Plugins are useful but can be overly seductive leading to premature extraction and generalization of functionality (similarly for metaprogramming techniques).
  
  3) Performance must be carefully considered and that, usefully, measuring it can be very hard.
  
  4) There is no substitute for good design.
  
  5) Always host with people you trust.
  
  Not an insight but...
  
  6) If you find yourself writing debugging puts statements in the ActionPack source code then you are in a world of pain and you have my deepest sympathies.

• Product Manager

  PAOGA Ltd.

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  February 2006 — October 2006 (9 months)

  I was responsible for developing the PAOGAperson product plan to build a digital safe deposit box, enhance it with additional services and extend it to create a personal information exchange that delivers convenience, peace of mind, and value-benefits for subscribing individuals and suppliers. Working alongside the technical team we built and successfully took to beta the digital deposit box prototype and the exchange framework. I worked with the CEO to create and implement the marketing plan and with the director of business development on building partnerships with 3rd parties.

• Technical Marketing

  PAOGA Ltd.

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  October 2004 — February 2006 (1 year 5 months)

  My key achievement was researching & developing targeted business propositions addressing key market sectors identified by the exec team. I worked with the business development director and CEO pitching to prospects. I acted as the technical liaison between prospects/customers, business development, and the development team to ensure that customer requirements were properly discovered and clearly understood. Critically I was successful at communicating technical decisions, consequences, and plans to non-technical audiences.

• Founder

  Novissio Ltd.

  (Privately Held; Myself Only; Computer Software industry)

  July 2002 — October 2004 (2 years 4 months)

  I started a company to persue the pioneering work I was doing in using blogs for lightweight knowledge management. I built a tool called liveTopics which was one of the first (if not the first) tool to allow bloggers to organize a collection of posts by tagging and turn their weblog into a semantic knowledge store.
  
  I learned many valuable lessons during this time in particular how hard it is to start a new venture, especially in an area that is ahead of the market. I also learned that focus is essential in any new venture and that it's very hard to be both a consultant and a software developer.

• Partner

  Evectors Software

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  September 2002 — August 2004 (2 years)

  I joined Evectors to co-author the first tag-based group RSS aggregator which we called "K-Collector". A product ahead of is time in 2002, K-Collector is aimed at developing a light-weight approach to helping people make connections within their business and industry and be aware of important trends and discoveries. K-Collector was one of the first explicitly social applications for enterprises and exploits blogs, wiki, and RSS.
  
  In the process we developed Easy News Topics (and extension to the RSS2.0 format) for sending topics through RSS feeds created the first structured tag based internet portal "W4". Paolo Valdemarin (Evectors CEO) and I conceived and designed K-Collector as an evolution of the work we had done on blogs and tagging previously.

• Technical Consultant

  Hipbone Inc.

  (Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Computer Software industry)

  July 2001 — July 2002 (1 year 1 month)

  As part of a 2-man European spearhead I supported the UK MD in sales activities including writing propositions, creating and delivering presentations to prospects, and developing integrations with customer systems. I was responsible for managing ongoing technical relationships with customers and partners and acted as 1st line support for the US mothership.

• Development Manager

  Metadyne Ltd.

  (Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Computer Software industry)

  March 2000 — July 2001 (1 year 5 months)

  I lead a 5 man team developing a new framework for component based development in Java. I established an engineering culture in the team bringing in testing, version control, design patterns, and other disciplines. I was responsible for evolving the architecture and ensured the team delivered the 1.0 product in budget and on schedule.

• Senior Intranet Developer

  University of North London

  (Educational Institution; 1001-5000 employees; Higher Education industry)

  August 1996 — March 2000 (3 years 8 months)

  I was part of the team responsible for the selection, acquisition, and roll-out of the Livelink knowledge management system. I lead pilot projects that eventually lead to deployment across the institution. I was also responsible for the development and day-to-day maintenance of a series of intranet applications and helped form University intranet and e-learning policy.

Matt Mower’s Education

• London Metropolitan University

  Posgraduate Certificate, Psychology, 2004 — 2005

  Studied for the certificate part-time while working for PAOGA. My aim is to take the postgraduate diploma and then study for an M.Sc. in the cognitive science field or possibly counselling.

• University of North London

  B.Sc.(hons) 1st Class, Mathematics & Computing, 1992 — 1996

  Winner of prize for best computing project. I have a math degree but I hate numbers - especially when they have a decimal point - fortunately for me lots of higher math is abstract.

Additional Information

Matt Mower’s Websites:

• My Website
• My Blog
• My RSS feed

Matt Mower’s Interests:

poker, cats, INTP, music, thunderstorms, Italy, wine, reading, books, kurt vonnegut, comedy, tony hancock, film, maltese falcon, laughter, learning, research, challenge, caring, search 4 meaning, pragmatic, games, collaboration, complexity, aspects, psychology, knowledge, strategy, early adopter, knowledge management, innovator, software, psychology, ruby, topic maps, values, weblogs, knowledge organisation, politics, passion, libertarian, open minded, listening, leadership, viktor frankl

Matt Mower’s Contact Settings

Interested In:

• career opportunities
• consulting offers
• new ventures
• job inquiries
• expertise requests
• business deals
• reference requests
• getting back in touch