z BubbleRings.com :: Inventor

About the Inventor of the RingMachine:
David E. Whiteis

Hi, I'm David E. Whiteis, and I'm the inventor of the RingMachine, and the creator of this web site. This section of this web site will tell you a little bit more about me.

My day job is as a computer engineer (MCSE and CCNA) for the J. Craig Venter Institute. I've been doing this sort of work for over 20 years. I'm also an occasional programmer, web developer and digital video producer.

In my free time I like to get involved in a variety of projects. The BubbleRings patent is my second patent to issue. My most successful entrepreneurial adventure in the past was a computer program, patent and web site that I called the Similarities Engine (or SE). You know the way Amazon.com will recommend that you buy a particular music CD or book, based solely on what books or CDs you have purchased in the past? Well, the SE patent was one of the very first patents of this kind to be approved by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Through a series of business deals, Microsoft ended up owning the patent and the technology. I'm not sure what Microsoft is doing with it, but I did see that one of Amazon's latest patents references my patent as relevant prior art. (Here's a list of the more than 144 patents that reference mine.) I hope to do more in the field of collaborative filtering one day; it is a fascinating area.

Certainly the best thing to come out of the whole Similarities Engine adventure for me, was that I met my wife Kasia because of it. I joined up with a company that was based partly in Krakow, Poland, and Kasia was working there. We met when I spent 4 months in Krakow, and eventually I talked her into moving back to the U.S. with me here. That was in 1997. Our first child was born in 2001. He's doing just fine and he makes us both incredibly happy.

I'm one of 6 children, and we're all pretty close. We're all online to one degree or another, and we use a small email distribution list I set up to keep in touch, in addition to the phone and visits. My Mom and Dad are both retired and live nearby. My Dad was a news broadcaster with Voice of America, and my Mom was a nurse at the NIH for several years. They enjoy spending time with their 10 grand-kids, and travelling, among other things.

I like to learn new technologies. I very much enjoyed getting to know something about digital video production, as I put together the RingMachine videos that you can see here on this web site, and another longer DVD video that I'll be using to help me find investors in the product line. I have done a good bit of programming and web development over the years, including this unfinished system I call DW-GovWeb, (written in Visual Basic and MS Access). In my career, I've written programs that were used in K-12 education, oil refinery modeling, genetic micro-arrayer database management, computer BIOS development, listserve maintenance, collaborative filtering and others. I am a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE) and a Cisco Certified Networking Associate (CCNA). I grabbed the URL Songlyrics.com a few years ago, and that was a nice success for my wife and I--she developed a great web site there, but we have since sold it and the new owners have redesigned it completely.

You can learn more about me and Kasia at this older web site of mine, whiteis.com There are also links there to many of the subjects that I've mentioned here in this page if you are interested.

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