Jonathan Clark Roberts

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Jonathan Clark Roberts
Born November 6, 1966
Topeka, KS
Occupation Innovator at Amazon.com
Parents Jack and Barbara

Jonathan Roberts (November 6, 1966 – ) of the United States is a business and technology innovator at Amazon.com whose most significant contribution to date is the creation of the world's first internet advertisement. Jonathan was born on November 6, 1966 in Topeka to Jack and Barbara (nee Panzer) Roberts. Jonathan is the second of four sons. His father is a banker turned entrepreneur. Entrepreneurship dates back to Jack's parents, Archie and Velma Marguerite, whose prudent investments allowed Archie's carpenter salary to build a small real estate empire on Lake Olathe in Olathe, Kansas while raising three children. Jonathan and each of his three brothers have, in turn, started their own ventures. His mother, Barbara, now teaches gifted education in the Blue Valley School District after decades teaching in the Shawnee Mission School District. Her mother, Lena Mae Bohling, had taught in a one-room schoolhouse outside Lincoln, KS before marrying Herman Panzer, an upstart farmer with no land to his name. Together, they built a very successful wheat farm and raised three children. Jonathan's parents divorced and his father married Arlie Gaut who gave him a son, Jamey, Jack's fourth son.

Jack and Barbara met in the late 50s at the University of Kansas where Barbara helped Jack with mathematics and he recounted school texts to her. They married in 1959 living in Lawrence, Kansas where their eldest son, Monte, was born on Halloween of 1961. Moving frequently in the early years, Jonathan was born in Topeka in 1966 and Bradley in Wichita in 1971. Jamey was born in Topeka in 1977.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Childhood

Much was expected of the Roberts boys. Each read before kindergarten and started piano lessons at age 5, the same age Jack taught each boy to play chess. Beyond piano, each child was expected to learn at least two more musical instruments: one symphonic and one plectrum. Following in Monte's footsteps, Jonathan chose trumpet and guitar.

Education was very important in the Roberts household, but not to the exclusion of fun. Jonathan was active in Indian Guides, Scouting in grade school thanks in large part to the Heitmeyer family who took leadership roles in both groups. David Heitmeyer is Jonathan's longest-standing friend having met in the first grade. As children, they were inseparable, exploring science, philosophy, theology and sports together. Widely considered among the smartest kids at school, David and Jonathan were fiercely competitive with others, but not with each other. Wilder times were had with other friends, Andy Bryant, Todd Tenbrink, Dan Gillespie, Zane Bently, etc. It is best not to go into too much detail there. ;^) As a teen, Jonathan bridged gaps between social castes: nerds, jocks, freaks, band-geeks, theater geeks, etc. This seemingly minor skill is central to Jonathan's success today.

[edit] Education

Well prepared at home for school, Jonathan sailed through K-12, acing every subject he came across. His grades were impeccable and his SAT scores were high. This allowed him the time and space to pursue the non-academic fun of childhood noted above.

Academically, Jonathan's first love is Mathematics, his second is Computer Science. Inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey, he decided to create an Artificial Intelligence. Carnegie Mellon University seemed the best place to study. After a few AI classes, it became clear that true consciousness wasn't going to be created artificially anytime soon. In the late 80s, the fields of distributed computing and advanced computer architectures were lively and interesting, so Jonathan shifted his focus there, staying an extra year to pursue Computer Engineering and a smattering of graduate classes in both Computer Science and Computer Engineering.

[edit] Professional career

[edit] Transarc

In 1990, Jonathan joined Transarc, a startup out of Carnegie Mellon University funded by IBM and founded by professor Alfred Spector, one of Jonathan's favorite CS professors. Many of the Transarc engineers were recent PhD recipients from CMU and elsewhere. Working at Transarc was a bit like attending graduate school learning from such luminaries as Josh Bloch, Graeme Dixon and Rich Sanzi.

Here, Jonathan worked on Encina, a transaction monitor. Encina was built upon the Open Software Foundation's Distributed Computing Environment and was primarily focused on transactions spanning multiple persistent stores (e.g. databases) spread over networks.

In May of 1993, a Transarc colleague showed Jonathan the Mosaic web browser. Impressed, Jonathan converted some Transarc documents from SGML to HTML with a simple Perl script. He showed this to Alfred Spector, Transarc's CEO, suggesting Transarc could not only make their documents available to its customers in electronic form, but could also integrate its primary product, Encina, into Mosaics HTTPDaemon enabling users to bank or even shop online. Professor Spector dismissed the idea as far-fetched. After all, only nerds were online.

[edit] The Internet Group (TIG)

Within a weeks after his idea was turned down by Transarc's CEO, Jonathan had joined Michael Bauer's TIG working evenings and weekends for TIG while still working at Transarc. At first, Jonathan was the IT department. He downloaded linux over a 2400 baud modem onto 52 floppy diskettes and installed it on his Gateway 2000 DX2/66 MHz Intel machine with no Operating System backup in case of failure. It was on this machine where they published an online catalog for US Judaica (still in 1993), one of the very first online catalogs in the world.

At TIG, Michael and Jonathan developed one of the most powerful business ideas in use today. In order to raise cash to fund the business, Michael had secured a consulting contract with O'Reilly and Associates who was putting together an online magazine, Global Network Navigator (GNN). They wanted to monetize this magazine, but didn't know how. Michael and Jonathan proposed dedicating a section of each article page to displaying links to paying advertisers. Jonathans specific contribution was that these links should be clickable images allowing the advertisers to more easily promote their brand. This was the world's first internet advertisement.

[edit] Zirkle-Wells

A former colleague of Jonathan’s, Dan Zigmond, recruited Jonathan for Zirkle Wells consulting company in Boulder, Colorado in 1994. Here, they developed a system to manage the distribution of digital video advertisements to neighborhood-sized markets using OSF’s DCE. One result of this work was their co-authoring of an article about Object Oriented DCE in Dr. Dobb’s Journal.

[edit] Visigenic/Inprise

Moving to the next logical step in distributed computing, Jonathan moved to Visigenic, a startup building a CORBA implementation. Here, Jonathan’s early focus was creating the OTS (Object Transaction Service) doing some software development and some project management. After Borland bought Visigenic, Jonathan coordinated the development of the flagship product Inprise Application Server.

[edit] Amazon.com

Jonathan was recruited to join Amazon.com in early 1999 as part of Amazon’s effort to move toward a service oriented computing model. After a year of working in the services platform group, Jonathan moved to help his most significant customer, Customer Service Applications. Here, he worked on many projects to improve the customer experience, reduce costs and reduce fraud, all the while learning the discipline required to manage and perform in an operations based environment.

In 2005, Jonathan became the first technical project manager to join the effort to deliver a multi-channel ordering platform for Marks & Spencer commercial website, a large retailer based in London. Jonathan’s specific focus was to create ordering channels for “in store ordering” and “telephone ordering”. Jonathan’s strategic decisions here lead to a “platform solution” for both of these systems which could easily be reused for other merchants with only minor branding configuration changes. This strategy is a significant departure from the website strategy used for merchant engagements which tend to be tailor made. Jonathan has continued to promote this strategy for the Order Pipeline (checkout) reducing the cost of development dramatically. timex.com is the first instance of this configurable Order Pipeline.

[edit] Published works

Using OODCE

[edit] See also

List related internal (Wikipedia) articles in alphabetical order. Common nouns are listed first. Proper nouns follow.

Persondata
NAME
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION
DATE OF BIRTH
PLACE OF BIRTH
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH