Alex Poon

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Alex D. Poon (born April 1969) resides in Silicon Valley and was one of the first engineers at eBay. He is the CEO of Bonfire Media, a mobile content-provider responsible for eBay Wireless, Prices2Go, WikiMobile and DeckStats. He is also co-founder of Wiki For Us and Last Spotted. He is a big LSU Tigers sports fan.

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[edit] Childhood

Alex grew up in a family of five, with one older brother, Edward, and a younger sister, Anna. Though born in Houston, Texas, he spent almost all of his childhood in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. His parents, Power Poon and Grace Poon, were raised in Hong Kong and moved to the United States in 1966, only a few years before Alex was born.

As the middle child, Alex constantly fought with both his older and younger siblings. One of his fights with his older brother Edward resulted in a broken window, a bloody hand that is still scarred to this day, and corporal punishment.[1] His fights with his sister Anna were so frequent that she complained over and over that she wished "Alex were never born." Anna no longer feels this way.[2]

All in all, Alex considers his childhood a happy one.[3]

[edit] Education

Alex was the shiest child in his Kindergarten class. In fact, Alex was so shy that once he wet his pants rather than raising his hand and asking to go the restroom.[4] Part of his shyness possibly stemmed from the fact that, because his parents were new to the country, Alex spoke with an odd accent, part Cajun and part Chinese, and was required to attend speech therapy at school.

Alex remained fairly shy in school until 4th grade, when, due to desegregation laws in Louisiana, he was transferred to Cedarcrest Elementary, where he met his most influential teacher, Mrs. Bunny Purvis. Mrs. Purvis recognized that while Alex was bright, he needed a boost in social confidence. She forced him to run for class president, and despite Alex's reluctance, he won. While not a position that held any real responsibilities, the title of class president gave him just the boost he needed to come out of his shell.

After an unremarkable three years split between Glasgow and McKinkley Middle Schools, Alex attended Baton Rouge High School, the only magnet high school in his hometown. A bit of a nerd, Alex was president of BRHS's Mu Alpha Theta (math club). He graduated as valedictorian of his class (1987) and was one of two students from Louisiana to be honored with the Presidential Scholars award, for which he accepted at the White House from Ronald Reagan.

After high school, Alex spent the next nine years at Stanford University. Originally enrolled in pre-medicine as a Biology major, Alex abruptly switched majors late in his third year of studies to become a Computer Science major. To this date, Alex considers that moment as one of his best and most significant decisions in his life, though in truth, the biggest impetus for the change was to avoid an early-morning physiology class required for Biology majors.[5] After graduating with a B.S. in Computer Science in 1991, Alex entered the Masters program in Medical Information Sciences at Stanford. Shortly thereafter, Alex entered the Ph.D. program in Medical Information Sciences and graduated in 1996. While in the program, Alex created PEN-Ivory, software for allowing physicians to input medical information using pen-based computers. His dissertation examined more generally how uncertainty affects human-computer interaction in computer medical systems.

[edit] Career

Between 1992 and 1996, while working on his Ph.D. at Stanford, Alex worked at Xerox PARC, and Silicon Studios, then a subsidiary of Silicon Graphics. At PARC, along with Karon Weber and Todd Cass, he created Scribbler, a system for searching handwritten notes on a tablet computer, and Marquee, a tool for logging video using tablet computers. At Silicon Studios, Alex helped design the user interfaces for new animation tools created for Dreamworks, who first used the tools to create the feature film The Prince of Egypt.

Immediately after graduation in 1996, Alex joined Wise Medical Systems, a startup developing tablet-based computers and software to be used in hospitals and medical clinics. He helped build Wise's next-generation software by applying many of the concepts he developed at Stanford with PEN-Ivory. However, after only a year, Wise lost its funding, and Alex, along with 75 other employees, were out of work.

After Wise's demise, Alex took a month off before joining eBay in mid 1997 as one of its first engineers and its first "UI guy." During his five years at eBay, Alex ran a number of different engineering groups, including the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) group, the Advanced Technologies Group (ATG), the Kernel group and the Applications Programming Interface (API) group. After a brief stint in eBay Product Management, Alex left eBay in late 2002, and along with Richard Chen, founded Bonfire Media, where he is currently the CEO.

Bonfire's current products are eBay Wireless, a mobile version of eBay; Prices2Go, a comparison shopping mobile web service; WikiMobile, a mobile version of Wikipedia; and DeckStats, a mobile analytics tool. Bonfire's eBay Wireless and WikiMobile products have been recognized with multiple awards, with the most recent being WikiMobile's 2007 Wave Award for Favorite Mobile Application.

Alex also founded No So Famous LLC with friend Brian Park, where he helps build Wiki For Us and Last Spotted in his spare time.

[edit] Personal Life & Interests

Alex is married to Buffy Poon and has three children. He is a big Louisiana sports fan, and is particularly fond of the LSU Tigers basketball and football teams, and the New Orleans Saints. Despite being an alum, he is just a fair-weather fan of the Stanford Cardinal.

Alex likes to play basketball, volleyball, tennis and table tennis, but hasn't played in years. He was once ranked as a top-10 US junior (under 17) in table tennis, and played twice in the Junior Olympics but did not medal. He ruptured his achilles tendon in 2005 and has curtailed his sporting activities that require jumping and sprinting. He enjoys golf, but plays only once a year and has a 40+ handicap.

Alex is well-known among his friends as a video-game addict. He currently plays NBA 2K8, Rock Band, GTA IV, Wii Fit and Rainbow Six Vegas 2. He retired from Mario Kart DS after realizing he was unable to beat his friends.

Alex is also well-known among his friends for being ultra competitive. He loves to win, even if the competition is not always fair. For example, he recently challenged Lily Shen, a woman about half his size, to an eating contest.[6] He won easily.

Alex loves Cajun food and his favorite food is boiled crawfish, which he orders directly from Louisiana and has shipped live overnight. In fact, he built in his backyard a custom crawfish boiler that can boil 40lbs of crawfish at once. He is sad that crawfish season lasts only three months out of the year.

[edit] Friends & Family

[edit] References

  1. ↑ Edward Poon
  2. ↑ Anna Poon
  3. ↑ Alex Poon
  4. ↑ Grace Poon
  5. ↑ Alex Poon
  6. ↑ Brian Park

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://www.wikiforus.com/wiki/Alex_Poon"
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