About Erik Townsend

Erik Townsend wan a technologist and entrepreneur during the 1990s tech boom, and is now a private investor. Erik is also something of a public education activist, working on a volunteer basis to help educate Main Street America about the true functioning of the Economy, and how it relates to Energy and the Envrionment.

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. 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.

As a technologist and entrepreneur, Erik now believes that location-enabled mobile computing will be the next "new new thing",  and he occasionally considers strategic angel investments in the location-enabled world. Early in 2008, Erik seriously considered a return to entrepreneurship because he believes the opportunities in this space are very ripe. However, after much contemplation and introspection, Erik concluded that he is happier spending his time on non-profit efforts to improve Americans' understanding of the threats our nation faces as a result of governmental mismanagement of the economy.

Erik spends most of his time on his (volunteer) efforts to educate Americans on the threats our nation faces due to the electorate becoming complacent and loosing touch with what's really happening as a result of our goverenment's economic and foreign policy blunders. Erik serves as the Business Manager for www.ChrisMartenson.com on a volunteer basis, and is always looking for audiences to which he can deliver his lecture, The Economy, Energy and the Environment in Plain English, which is based on Dr. Chris Martenson's Crash Course.