About Erik Townsend

Erik Townsend was a technologist and entrepreneur in the United States during the 1990s tech boom, and is now a private investor based in Hong Kong. Erik is also something of a public education activist, and spent several months of 2008 volunteering his time to help Dr. Chris Martenson promote his Crash Course, which explains how the economy really works and what really caused the current credit crisis in plain English that anyone can understand.

As a technologist, Erik spent most of his career pioneering the ideas that are now commonly known as Service-Oriented Architecture, or SOA. He began his career working as an outside consultant to Digital Equipment Corporation, where he designed and developed distributed application software for factory shopfloor automation and workflow control. Erik was one of a handful of early visionaries who invented his own "middleware" for building distributed application systems before the commercial middleware market existed.

In 1991 Erik founded The Cushing Group, Inc., a niche consultancy that focused exclusively on taking the concepts now known as Service-Oriented Architecture to market. Web Services (or the Web itself for that matter) had yet to be invented in 1991, so most of The Cushing Group's projects were based on object-oriented middleware that implemented the Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA). Erik's recent white paper titled The 25 Year History of Service Oriented Architecture chronicles the early history of SOA, and is available in the White Papers section of this web site.

After selling The Cushing Group, Inc. in 1998, Erik took a few years off to pursue personal interests, then became a private investor. His investment approach is primarily macro-driven, and he actively trades futures, equities and occasionally, listed options. Erik also has a strong interest in a number of social concerns including the climate crisis, the erosion of civil liberties in the United States, and reforming corporate governance. In the summer of 2007, Erik traveled to the polar arctic with scientists from MIT and Berkeley on a Global Warming Symposium.

Erik briefly considered a return to entrepreneurship in 2008 because he believes the nascent location-enabled mobile computing market shows great promise. But after some contemplation he concluded that the overall macroeconomic prospects for the United States remain poor, and that this wasn't the time to launch a new business to compete with much better-capitalized mobile phone companies.

Erik moved to Hong Kong in late 2009, where he now trades futures and manages his own investment portfolio on a full-time basis. Several people have suggested that he should start a hedge fund to express his macro view on Peak Cheap Oil and Precious Metals, but at the present time he's content managing his own investments. He occasionally publishes articles, primarily because he finds the process of writing helps him refine his own investment strategies.

At the present time, this web site serves no particular commercial purpose. It was set up in 2008 when Erik briefly considered a return to entrepreneurship. Please excuse the fact that the site is not terribly well organized and may not be up to date. With no commercial impetus to maintain it, Erik seldom pays attention to the site and sometimes forgets it's even here!