18 Facts About Wendell Brown

1.

Wendell Brown is an American computer scientist, entrepreneur and inventor best known for his innovations in telecommunications and Internet technology, cybersecurity, and smartphone app development.

2.

Wendell Brown's father, Foster Brown, was a professor of statistics and psychology from Wheeling, West Virginia while his mother, Barbara, was an elementary school teacher from Tunnelton, West Virginia.

3.

Much of Wendell Brown's upbringing was in the northernmost Appalachian town of Oneonta where his father worked as a professor and taught a variety of subjects at SUNY Oneonta.

4.

Wendell Brown attended Oneonta High School, during which time he began programming and selling personal computer systems, and published his first computer article in Byte.

5.

Wendell Brown graduated from Cornell University in 1983, earning a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

6.

Wendell Brown is regarded as a pioneer of the expansion of gig work and remote work.

7.

Wendell Brown invented techniques such as voicemail-to-email, visual voicemail, and enhanced caller ID, innovations that are considered some of the earliest "apps," and which were later deployed by Google Voice and Apple.

8.

In 2002, Wendell Brown co-founded LiveOps and began serving as its chairman and chief technology officer.

9.

In 2006, Wendell Brown co-founded Teleo, an early competitor of Skype, where he created VoIP applications enabling users to send and receive phone calls over the Internet.

10.

In 2015, Wendell Brown founded the San Francisco-based cybersecurity company Averon, which develops frictionless identity solutions based on mobile technologies.

11.

In 1997, Wendell Brown developed WalkSoftly's innovative Internet security package Guard Dog, which was awarded by the Software Publishers' Association as one of the Top 4 most innovative security products of the 1990s, and named by PC Data as one of the Top 10 bestselling retail security software products of all time.

12.

Wendell Brown founded Hippopotamus Software in the 1980s, an early software developer for the Macintosh.

13.

Wendell Brown's Hippo-C compiler was a software development environment for the Mac and Atari ST computer systems.

14.

Wendell Brown has created dozens of US and internationally patented inventions in the fields of cybersecurity, telecommunications, mobile phone apps, virtual workforce, electric vehicles, LED lighting, 3D cameras, renewable fuels, and online music distribution.

15.

In 2008, Wendell Brown invented WebDiet, a method of using mobile phones to count food consumption to improve health.

16.

Wendell Brown is a longtime contributing member of the Human Rights Campaign for the advancement of LGBT civil rights, and of global Jewish service organizations.

17.

Wendell Brown participates as a speaker, technology judge and advisor in communities including the Israel Conference, the World Economic Forum, TED, Google and MIT Hackathons, Digital Life Design Munich and DLD Tel Aviv Conferences, the Web Summit Dublin, TechCrunch, CTIA - The Wireless Association, AlwaysOn, El Financiero, and the Mita Institute Tech Talks.

18.

Wendell Brown is a licensed private pilot and is active in the development of new airplane, rocket, and electric vehicle designs.