Sean is a social technologist and entrepreneur in San Francisco, California.
He graduated from Princeton University in 1992 with a BA in English Literature and Visual Arts, afterwards working in architecture and design in New York City, and then as a songwriter, guitarist and producer for Atlantic Records in Los Angeles, where he specialized in production on emergent digital audio systems with the artist Poe. In 1995 he attended the University of Vermont for a non-degree concentration in Computer Science, before completing a Masters in Interactive Telecommunications at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts in 1998. Prior to MSR he worked extensively in immersive and projected real-time virtual environments with Jaron Lanier, as a web developer creating on-line university and educational community sites and user-generated knowledge databases, and in designing sensor-based interfaces to interactive displays.
From 2000 onwards he was an adjunct professor at NYU/ITP, teaching masters degree design and prototyping classes such “The Multi-User Experience” and “Rapid Prototyping for Social Software”. He is also a partner in eTonal Media, a company focused on on-line music education, community and on-line retailing producing a variety of web properties such as wholenote.com and activemusician.com. He was the inventor of Wallop, a social/communications application for sharing personal media within social networks. He led the development of the Wallop prototype from 2003 as a research software developer in the Social Computing Group at Microsoft Research (MSR), in Redmond, Washington. He was previously a developer at Microsoft for MSR’s Virtual Worlds Group, focusing on immersive content, 3D and authoring tools, audio, and multi-user interfaces.
In 2005 he co-founded San Francisco spinoff Wallop, Inc. transitioning it from Microsoft to a venture-backed startup with investment from Bay Partners and Norwest Venture Partners, and was CTO of Wallop through 2006. In early 2007 he co-founded Dizzywood.com, a massively multiplayer web playground for kids, where he invented a unique multi-user gaming platform including the client graphics systems and application architecture, and currently heads product strategy and development.
