Nice to meet you!

My name is Erik van Eykelen and I help launch and build technology companies. Born in 1968, raised in The Netherlands, living mostly in France, entrepreneur since 1989.

Founded (and sold) three companies (Mediapoint, HVE and BackStream) prior to becoming an independent technical advisor 1895 days ago.

I work for (international) customers and startups. Currently I'm full-time involved with Glaxstar, the company behind the widely used Firefox add-ons for eBay, Yahoo/Delicious and Digg.

Technical skills:

• Architecting and designing large-scale server applications, back-ends, and web sites;
• Coding back-ends using Ruby on Rails (sorry, no more Java please);
• Designing user interfaces using pen or pencil, Photoshop, Illustrator and Balsamiq;
• Coding user interfaces using (X)HTML, CSS and JavaScript (incl. jQuery and Prototype). I'm AJAX buzzword compatible too;
• Creating 'consumer-friendly' APIs based on JSON and XML (XML-RPC, SOAP) using RESTful designs;
• Specifying-by-hacking' mock-ups of server apps, browser add-ons (Firefox and IE) and mobile device applications (including iPhone, Symbian and Blackberry);
• Installing and managing Linux-based servers. In-depth knowledge of Ubuntu, Apache (+Passenger), and MySQL;
• Implementing (as in 'getting teams to use') knowledge/information/project management tools such as Jira, Confluence, Basecamp, and Mediawiki;
• Implementing and using source code versioning systems (SVN, Git).

Management skills

• CxO-level management experience as former CTO of BackStream, a company I co-founded in 2000 (with business units sold to CTP/Novell in 2003 and to Ordina/Clockwork in 2004);
• Managing internationally dispersed internal development teams using SCRUM as project management methodology;
• Working with international offshore and near-shore outsourcing companies.

I'm a Mac user, a former famous 8-bit hacker and member of the Mars Society. I love books, music and art house movies. I do a little bit of sailing, and a lot of running. I travel a lot.

I can be reached at

You can also find me on Github, Facebook, Flickr, Goodreads and Flavors.

Speaking at the O'Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference, January 24-26, 2006 in Burlingame, California

Photo credits: James Duncan Davidson