Ray King Bio

The Computer School (1982)

Using 4 Apple II computers and his bedroom, taught folks BASIC programming and popular applications such as Visicalc and dBase II.


The Computer Workshop (1983)

Continued to teach this summer, but instead using the new IBM PC's and teaching applications such as Lotus 123 and Multimate (early word processor). Rented a room in father's architectural office and advertised using a card table and a computer in Grand Central Station which was across the street.

Worked with partners David Bolocan, Lauren Singer and Seachin Kim. Co-authored "Mastering Multiplan". David, who did most of the work on this went, on to write quite a few more computer books.

MicroTrek Enterprises (1984)

After 1 year of college, Ray took time off to start MicroTrek Enterprises with 2 CPA's from Price Waterhouse.

Semaphore, Inc. (1986-2000)

Wrote financial management software for his father's architectural firm and eventually started a company to go with that. The product, Sema4, is used by approximately 2,500 firms in the U.S. that are between the sizes 10 and 1,000 employees. Semaphore, Inc. ultimately grew to 100+ employees split across 4 offices (New York, California, Minnesota and Oregon) and was sold to Deltek Systems, Inc. on August 9th of 2000.

SnapNames, Inc. (2000-2005)

In the fall of 2000, Ray moved to Portland, Oregon to co-found SnapNames. SnapNames is in the business of helping people acquire domain names as they expire and become available again to the general public. SnapNames was acquired by Oversee.net in 2007.

  • DropCatching is the term generally used to describe picking up names as quickly as possible after they are "dropped" from the registry.
  • WLS was the acronym used for the "Wait List Service" which was never launched
  • Transfer Fulfillment describes a process where "backordered" domain names transfer ownership during the registrar grace period.

ICANNWiki.org

Ray has always been a big fan of collaborative technologies, and in early 2005 got bitten by the wiki-bug. For this, he credits his friend John Stanton who is always making him look at new stuff.

My first wiki project was ICANNWiki. The domain name business introduced me to ICANN, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, and the ICANN community subsequently taught me much of what I know about the innner workings of the DNS. It's a fascinating group of people that meet three times per year in various locations around the world. ICANNWiki showcases those people, the companies they work for, issues discussed and terms used by the industry.

WikiIndex.org

The next wiki I worked on is the WikiIndex, which as you might guess, is a listing of all wikis in the world that we can find. The WikiIndex's roots was a site called SwitchWiki -- MarkDilley's original comprehensive list of wikis that he had compiled over the years. WikiIndex is a great way to see what's happening in the wiki world and as well find wikis that cover many different subject matters. There are over 3,500 wikis listed by topic, wiki engine, language, edit mode and activity. What's best is that it is itself a wiki, so anyone with a wiki can self elect into the index! Much credit to MarkDilley, TedErnst and John Stanton for barnraising this.

AboutUs, Inc. (2006 - Present)

Aircraft747v4 3AboutUs.jpg
These experiences have led me to my latest project, AboutUs. Like WikiIndex, the foundation is a page for every site, but because it encompasses the entire web there can be more synergy between pages and this metadata then becomes the starting point of a guide to the Internet that we all can use.


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