musings & critique about hi-tech, academia, building startups, and a journal to building eKita
Saturday, October 1, 2011
Hi, my name is Efraim Pettersson Ivener.
I like to jot down a few things from time to time about hi-tech, startups, entrepreneurship & academics.

My background as an Academic started - ironically - by testing out of (and dropping out of) highschool at 15, after which I went directly into University at 16. At 19 I graduated with my first degree - a BSc in Software Engineering from a polytech university in Arizona.
Since then (am now 31) I have continued studying & teaching pretty much non-stop. I have studied over 10 subjects at university level, and attained degrees/diplomas in 4 subjects spanning Sociology, Political Science, Interdisciplinary Sciences (Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics), and Computer Engineering/Science. To date I have studied or taught in more than 10 Universities in 7 countries. From some of the top schools to smaller technical schools. I even built and taught at a small school in a remote area of northern Brazil.

My background as an Entrepreneur started very early. At 13 I turned my sports card-collection hobby into a chain store starting from my father's garage in New Mexico to a storefront in Sweden. Fully including import-export.
I have also built 3 successful NPO organizations spanning social causes to entrepreneurship (not including one that failed miserably and cost me alot of money).

My background in hi-tech started at age 12 when I began hacking video games, building cheat programs, trainers, and cracking.
I began building hi-tech startups at the age of 16 with a student project. My first product was an opensource library for graphical manipulation and dynamically generated content using fractal & chaos math. Dynamically generated landscapes in games such as Diablo used this technology.
The next startup I started working on at 17, turned into a $3b company - one of the first HIS (Hospital Information Systems) that integrated connectability with devices. After that I was one of the first 3 engineers at Morpheus™ - the first global GPS Tracking & Telemetry system, which turned into a $6b company.
Since then I have led tech teams & development behind 4 more successful hi-tech startups in 4 different countries, as well as building a few non-tech startups and NPO's.

My background as a startup specialist started when I was about 19 years old. I was a very early adopter of opensource, leanstartup, and advanced development techniques which would later become defined in both SCRUM, TDD, and Agile development. I still like to run workshops on these methods to help contribute to the knowledge-base, usage, and evolution of these "best practices". Of coure - I also practice what I preach.

I currently operate in the following roles:

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