I am an entrepreneur, inventor and writer. I currently live in San Francisco, often also in New York and Buenos Aires. I am currently working on my fifth business, Der Mundo (part of the Worldwide Lexicon Project). Der Mundo is a collaborative translation system that combines computer translation, volunteers and professional translators to translate interesting web content into almost any language. I can be reached at bsmcconnell at gmail.
Companies
CMI (1991-1993) : Virginia based telecommunications consulting company. Designed and developed software for interactive voice response systems (phone systems).
PhoneZone (1996-2000) : San Francisco based catalog and buyers guide for business telephone systems and services. Operated out of a small storefront in the Inner Sunset district (7th and Irving), grew to about $3M in sales, and was acquired by publicly traded catalog company, Hello Direct, in early 1999 (and grew to $10-15M in annual sales as part of Hello Direct).
Trekmail (2001-2005) : San Francisco based software company that developed a clever mobile email service. It allowed users to dictate messages by phone which were then sent via email as compact MP3 audio files. Trekmail was several years ahead of its time (similar services today include Jott and Spinvox (although we did not include speech recognition as it was not yet usable for voice dictation at the time), but survived the downturn, and was acquired by mobile email provider Visto in summer 2005.
Open Communication Systems (2006-2007) : OCS developed an international conference calling and group communication service, Radio Handi. With it people could form online communities, and then communicate with each other via broadcast text messages, email, and live conference calls. OCS was acquired by Virtual PBX in summer 2007.
Worldwide Lexicon Inc (1998 – present) : Worldwide Lexicon Inc is commercializing work done on the Worldwide Lexicon project, an open source translation project that dates back to 1998. WWL combines machine and human translation to translate interesting web content quickly, accurately and inexpensively (free if enough volunteers are willing to participate).
Writing
I am an author, and have written for many technology and trade publications over the years. I currently write primarily for O’Reilly Media and GigaOm.
Education
Virginia Tech (’92), dual major in Electrical Engineering; Finance Insurance & Business Law.
Loyola High School Blakefield
