A serial entrepreneur, Jon has founded and run a number of technology companies. With a background in startups, strategic consulting, operations management and early stage venture funding, Jon’s companies have ranged from a specialty software company to an international consulting firm, which developed a knowledge management platform serving over 2,000 clients in 40 countries and at one time powered eBay’s international AnswerDesk. Individually and through his company Arden Technologies, Inc., (Arden) Jon has consulted for hundreds of startups, early stage companies and entrepreneurs as well as served on numerous advisory boards. Arden’s current foci are virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) applications, including both Natural Language Processing (NLP) and AI-based image enhancement. Recent projects include the development of a novel 360 VR drone that Jon co-designed (patent pending), and implementation of an in-house deep convolutional neural network (AI) to enhance historic documents for Arizona State University.
Jon founded his first company in college – OverByte, Corp – a specialty software company for the construction industry, which he subsequently sold. He then became the executive vice-president and president of a small chain of convenience stores (approx $10M annual sales) with offices in Colorado and locations in Oklahoma. With an undergraduate degree in philosophy and economics from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Jon entered the University of Colorado’s MBA program, but in 1996 he was recruited away from the MBA program to become the general managing partner of the Birmingham Internet Group (BIG) in Detroit, Michigan. BIG owned one of the first cybercafés and had a web development company which created many prominent sites including the first website for the NFL’s Detroit Lions.
In 1997 Jon founded the predecessor to today’s Museum Company® (www.museumcompany.com), which quickly became one of the largest retailers of museum artifact and jewelry reproductions online. With customers worldwide, ranging from individuals to TV series, films, museums and Fortune 500 companies, the (as known at that time) Museum Store Company expanded overseas manufacturing and employed rapid prototyping, 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies making thousands of pieces in the U.S.A. The Museum Store Company has been showcased in articles in USA Today’s print edition, NBC News, Forbes’ “Best of the Web” and HGTV Magazine. Their items have been seen in TV’s ABC’s Extreme Makeover Home Edition, FOX’s Sleepy Hollow, CBS’s Blue Bloods, NBC’s Manifest, and Showtime’s Loudest Voice in the Room. Many films, including Warner Brother’s Catwoman, Watchmen and Night at the Museum have also used Museum Store Company pieces. In 2010, Museum Store Company acquired MuseumCompany.com and MuseumCo.com, the online intellectual property of The Museum Company® a past competitor which had over 100 locations and over $0.5B in annual sales.
Jon was the founder and founding president of the international consulting and software development company TamTam®. TamTam served over 2,000 clients in 40 countries ranging from a small Biochemical Firm in India to Fortune 500 companies such as Western Union, providing advice on everything from market expansion, logistics, security, software, tariffs and trade. TamTam’s proprietary knowledge management software was used by Ebay to such a degree that the international seller and buyer resource sections on Ebay.com were at the time advertised as “Powered by TamTam”.
Additionally Jon founded ScanGo (www.scango.com) a leading document imaging company that specializes in historic document capture. ScanGo has electronically preserved millions of documents – many over a hundred years old — for Universities (Cornell, DU, CU, ASU), government agencies (US. Department of Justice, US Department of Agriculture, CDOT) to corporate clients such as Walmart, the Financial Planning Standards Board (FPSB), Gambro AB, the British firm P&O Nedlloyd, NAMM and Thermofisher Scientific. ScanGo was awarded a prime contractor contract for the U.S. Government and created a number of proprietary image processing methods including the invention of specialized scanning hardware along with the utilization of computational photography. ScanGo has provided 3D Scanning services since 2012, including a 2016 project scanning seat elements for a British MOD (Ministry of Defense) vehicle, and an actual piece of Apollo 13. Also in 2016, ScanGo was named the preferred archival scanning provider for the Arizona State University Library System. In 2018 and 2019 ScanGo deployed an in-house AI (Artificial Intelligence) deep convolutional neural network to perform image enhancement for ASU. ScanGo has also deployed in-house AI based NLP solutions for document research and discovery.
Through Jon’s principle company Arden and individually, he has consulted with hundreds of startups, early stage companies and entrepreneurs as well as served numerous advisory boards. As examples, Jon was a strategic advisor and was the first member of Mini Metal Maker LLC’s Advisory Board, which the Motley Fool (www.fool.com) announced on November 16th, 2013 as the creator of “the World’s 1st Desktop 3D Printer for Metal”. Also, in 2016, Jon co-invented the eSpheric™ drone system, a revolutionary patent pending immersive 360 degree HD recording technology for immersive HD 360 degree video recording platform for newsgathering, research, film, entertainment, virtual reality and augmented reality. In August 2016, the eSpheric flew its first full flight capturing unobstructed 360 degree video in the Redwood Forest of the Pacific Northwest – stay tuned! In 2014, in addition to serving on their advisory board, he was one of the first coaches added to an elite executive coaching practice that had clients from Wall Street to Silicon Valley, that was the official executive coaching firm of the NFL Superbowl Champion Denver Broncos, as well as has a direct lineage to Carl Jung. Leveraging his background in unstructured data capture (ScanGo) and knowledge management (TamTam) in 2014, Jon consulted with insurance coding companies on their utilization of IBM’s Watson (Artificial Intelligence / AI) platform for automation of this task. Jon, who has assisted since its inception, is a special advisor to FutureGrasp – a leading advisory group that identifies, tracks, forecasts and assesses emerging and disruptive technologies. Jon is also on the advisory board of the medial healthcare app creator Data2Care. More information about Advisory Boards and Ventures here.
Jon also loves to tinker with technology, creating a few fun items including 1997’s “Star Trek Phaser Laser Pointer” combining off the shelf parts for a fun presentation tool, as well as one of the first photo to art processes a few years prior — Portraite™.
Jon is a SCORE Certified Mentor and in 2017 was a “Mentor for Solutions / Onsite Entrepreneur” at the University of Denver’s Project X-ITE, which is a cross disciplinary effort to engage students and the community in the realms of entrepreneurship, innovation and technology. Jon has served as treasurer for two non-profits: for the Colorado Internet Keiretsu with over 500 members at its peak, and the Park Lane which had an annual operating budget over $2M. Jon has guest-lectured at the University of Denver’s MBA and MLS programs and was an advisory board member for a new master’s’ program in Knowledge Management. Most specially, Jon has had the privilege of accompanying his wife (an eye doctor) on international medical relief missions as a technician, including a 2005 tsunami aid mission to Sri Lanka. In his spare time, Jon enjoys reading, swimming, biking and traveling. Jon’s international experiences include: Belarus, Canada, China, England, France, Greece, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Ukraine, but most of the time these days you can find him in Denver, Colorado spending time with his three daughters.