GEEKZ ON DEMAND

Geekz on Demand (G.O.D) was a HR consultancy I started back in 1997 with Richard Taylor. At the time it was tech boom 1.0, and there was a dearth of talent that properly knew what the Internet was and how to get things onto it.

Entre The Geekbase, and it took off like a rocket, landing us in the news quite consistently:

Rowan and I on the cover of The Age, 27 Jan 1998.

The day this particular piece was written was a notable day. First thing in the morning, Katrina Kreer rings our office and says 'I demand a geek. They need to be cool, she has to be female, and they have to be at a photoshoot by 3pm'. I remember when the phone was hungup, my fantastic EA said 'We have a problem'. In typcial AP DO WHAT IT TAKES fashion, we hit the phones, and sure enough we found the delightful Cinamon Pollard whom fit the brief perfectly and was at the photo shoot well on time:

Geek-grrl and CyberChick Cinamon Pollard in The Sunday Telegraph, 8 Feb 1998.
The 'PRPR' continued non-stop for a while there, here's a few others:

G.O.D editorial in The Dail Telegraph, 9 Feb 1998.

Some G.O.D geeks looking 'rock-and-roll' including Ruth Slattery, Rowan Peter & Chris Beaumont
in OzEmail's final edition of Australain Net Guide (ANG), April 1998.

Yes, that's THE Chris Beaumont: the well-known Australian artist famous for his still life work set on the most extrordinarily deep black background ever seen and painter of the lobster flag flying over The George on Fitzroy Street. Before he was gainfully employed full time in the fine arts, I taught him how to 'web', and he supplemented his income for many years web authoring. Chris kindly painted me this number as a thank-you:

Chris' rendition of a famous polygon used by the renaissance artists to test light & shade.
Chris chose it for me because of the connection to geometry and computer graphics.

G.O.D wasn't just a talent agency, we did R&D as well. Of course we did, with someone like me around. We built one of the earliest web measurement platforms, called RetinaPlus. The only thing around at the time that was even slightly similar was WebSideStory (now Visual Sciences):

RetinaPlus review in the Business Section of The Age, 5 Feb 1999.

Shortly after releasing RetinaPlus as a proof-of-concept, the market was flooded by measurement software. I fell into a quite profitable discipline of freelancing around and building affiliate programs directly into websites for whomever wanted one. I then noticed a bunch of patents popping up, so to block anyone else doing the same I hid in the patent system a 100-page paper on how to build a measurement platform.