Mark-Jan Harte
Founder
Hello, I'm Mark-Jan Harte, born in 1971 and living in Amsterdam with my girlfriend Juleke, son Alexander, and two cats Bambi and Luca. My main interests (besides writing software) are reading, travel and sports. I also pretend to be able to beat the stock market, and therefore read The Economist magazine religiously. My favorite authors are sci-fi writers like Peter Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds, but I also like historal books (mostly about military history, like the Spanish Armada or World War I). The sports I play are squash, speed skating and golf - at varying levels of ability. My travels have taken me from the Richtersveld rock desert in South Africa to a longhouse in the jungle of Borneo - but there remains much more to explore :-)
My professional background is in computer science, which I studied at the Technical University in Eindhoven, Netherlands. During my college years I developed a computer card game called Canasta, to teach myself Windows programming. A roommate had taught me the game and I figured it would make a good project. After deciding to release it on CompuServe and bulletin boards (with my 2400 baud modem) I still remember the excitement of receiving the first shareware payment check from the US. I kept developing Canasta during the next couple of years, and in 2000 got the opportunity to turn my hobby into a full-time business when I joined with Alwin Hoogerdijk to form Collectorz.com. We continued to develop Canasta and two other games, but the main focus was, and is, the collection managers.
In September 2007 the time came for me to move on to a new project. I had always been interested in artificial intelligence and I wanted to have more time to spend on that. Therefore Alwin is now running Collectorz.com, and I left the company to work on the Netflix Prize. After that, I am planning to work on a new type of neural network, as described in the book 'On Intelligence' by Jeff Hawkins. Of course I will always remain interested in the cool new features and products Alwin and his team come up with!