Dana Allen

Dana R. Allen (born 1953) is an American inventor, high-tech executive and news media executive.

Career

He was a manager and a designer for the first successful electronic cataloging product the Triad Systems Electronic Catalog 1984–87, which was the dominant product in its sector for the subsequent 20 years, completely changing the way that auto parts are looked up in parts stores.

First e-commerce product

Allen left Triad to found Silicon Valley company Sequoia Data Corporation in 1987, where he served as CEO and chairman. Sequoia was founded to introduce CompuMarket(R), the first e-commerce product similar to today's eBay and Amazon. The service was successfully created, but was too early to market and received little funding from venture capitalists as they thought no one would ever buy things over a modem at that time.

Document imaging software

Allen then switched Sequoia Data in 1991 to the successful ScanFix(R) product line of optical character recognition image preprocessing software, for which he was awarded 7 US patents.^[1] ScanFix(R) obtained over 75% market share and millions of copies were sold. At one point, every Hewlett Packard, Fujitsu, and Ricoh scanner was sold with ScanFix(R) bundled into it. In 1996 Allen merged Sequoia Data Corporation with TMS to form a public company TMSSequoia.^[2] In 1999, Allen was promoted to being CEO and chairman. TMSSequoia was experiencing serious negative cash flow prior to Allen's taking over, but in less than one year with Allen at the helm, TMSSequoia achieved record positive cash flow and per employee productivity.

NewsMax.com

In July 1998 Allen joined NewsMax.com (originally called Sequoia Digital Corp.) at the request of its founder Christopher Ruddy.^[3] Ruddy named Allen founding chairman of the board, a position he held concurrently while serving as chairman of TMSSequoia. In late 1999, Allen moved to Florida to pursue NewsMax.com full-time as chairman and vice president of marketing. In 1999 and 2000, during his time as chairman, NewsMax experienced explosive growth and welcomed many prominent new members to the board, including famous journalist Arnaud de Borchgrave and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Thomas Moorer.

American Investigator Television

Allen served as president in 2000–2001 of this national television newsmagazine, which has broken many major stories, including an attempt by Libya to buy weapons technology illegally in the US (AITV reporters caught Libyan agents with secret cameras in a sting operation). ^[4]

Other activities

Authors and currency analysts Boris Schlossberg and Kathy Lien of DailyFX.com created a book of interviews with the world’s best traders. They included Allen as one of twelve selected for the book. The book was released in 2007 and is titled Millionaire Traders, Individual Traders who are beating Wall Street. It achieved No. 1 ranking on Amazon for business books in September 2007.^[5] Allen has worked on improving news reporting truthfulness in the US as a lifelong goal and has a long association with AIM (accuracy in media).^[6][7] Allen has made several $5,000 to $10,000 public wagers with the biggest figures in the American news media challenging them that they know they are censoring the news, including 60 Minutes founder Don Hewitt, Bob Woodward,^[8] and Sam Donaldson.^[9] The confrontation with Sam Donaldson is available on video at YouTube.^[10] All three admitted they were not willing to take the wager. There are recent additional inventions by Dana Allen that are patent pending. One is a way to eliminate oil from the gas in two-stroke engines, greatly reducing air pollution and another invention to recover oil spills directly at the source in deep water spills such as the spill in 2010 "Deepwater Horizon".

References