About Erik TownsendErik 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 The Crash Course, which explains how the economy really works and what really caused the current credit crisis in plain English that anyone can understand. 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 major trends affecting the planet and society. He investigated Global Warming but concluded only that that scientists on both sides of that debate are willing to compromise their science and professional integrity in order to advance political agendas they believe in. But more importantly, Erik realized that if predictions of Global Warming are true, they are the least of our problems. Peak Oil is far less understood and poses a far greater threat to society. 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 |
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