Walter De Brouwer

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Walter De Brouwer
File:Walter Portrait2.jpg
Born
Walter De Brouwer

(1957-05-09)9 May 1957
Aalst, Belgium
OccupationEntrepreneur
SpouseSamia Lounis
Children3

Walter De Brouwer ([dəˈbʁʌuəʁ]; born May 9, 1957) is a Belgian futurist, semiotician and internet entrepreneur.


Academic

Walter De Brouwer holds an MA in linguistics from the University of Ghent and a PhD in Semiotics from the Catholic Tilburg University in the Netherlands (the Biology of Language[1]). Until 1989 he was a lecturer at the Jesuit University of Antwerp (UFSIA[2]) and a faculty professor[3] at the International University of Monaco from 2001-2004. He has been a member of the Center for Entrepreneurial Learning (Judge Business School) of the University of Cambridge (UK) since 2004. He sits on the editorial team of the Journal for Chinese Entrepreneurship[4].

In the past he has been a corporate sponsor of Merton College (University of Oxford), the MIT MediaLab at MIT and recently the Singularity University’s FutureMed at NASA Ames.

He is a non-executive board member of Imperial College spinoff Bboxx.

Career

Walter De Brouwer is founder and CEO of SCANADU, a Silicon Valley-based healthcare company inspired by Kevin Kelly’s Quantified Self. In May 2011 he was appointed director in Jellybook, a new social media investment fund based in London.

Publishing

Walter De Brouwer set up Riverland Publications with the help of Bill Ziff in 1990 to publish personal computer magazines[5] in the Benelux. In 1994, when Ziff announced the sale of the publishing empire to Forstmann Little & Company, De Brouwer sold his titles to VNU. He then published WAVE, the ‘techno-anarchist’ gigazine, which together with Mondo 2000, with which it shared some writers such as R.U. Sirius, went into cyberpunk history. The magazine, edited by Michel Bauwens and designed by graffiti legend Niels Shoe Meulman[6], was put on display in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art[7].

Internet

In 1996 De Brouwer was one of the founders of PING (EUnet spin-off), the commercial company that came out of the European Unix Users Group (EUUG), which was acquired by Qwest Communications International (NYSE: Q). In 2000 Qwest became the third long-distance carrier in the US and the KPNQwest backbone was carrying more than 50% of European IP traffic[8]. In 1999, Jobscape, De Brouwer’s electronic employment site, merged with eight similar sites to make up Stepstone (STP.NO) before going public on both the London Stock Exchange and the Oslo Bors. The sequel to Stepstone, Pajamanation, the global site that empowered micropreneurs to work from home, filed for bankruptcy after 9 years in 2010.

Research

From 1996-2001, De Brouwer was a sponsor of the MIT Media Lab, and sat on the programming board of Nicholas Negroponte’s Digital Life project at the Medialab[9]. Inspired by Negroponte’s work, he set up the ‘Fundamental Research’ cult-laboratory Starlab which competed with Microsoft founder Paul Allen’s Interval Research Corporation and Xerox Parc, specializing in Blue skies research (Deep Future research[10]). The laboratory initially worked on BANG (the consilience of Bits, Atoms,Neurons and Genes[11]), and - according to Gartner - had at its disposal a full-time staff of 111 scientists from 36 countries with combined expertise across 40 disciplines[12]. Starlab produced generic patents in intelligent clothing[13] which were later sold to Philips Electronics, worked on Time Travel after recruiting the Russian physicist Sergei Krasnikov and laid the foundations for further research into MPEG-21. The Financial Times reported it as attracting ‘... the world’s brainiest nerds’[14], Fast Company called it a ‘Nerd Heaven’, Discovery Channel featured it as ‘... a place where thoughts are thought for the very first time’[15] and CNN listed it as a ‘lab of the last chance for important but risky ideas’[16]. The Sunday Times Magazine called Walter De Brouwer a ‘collateral thinker’ and for Corriere della Sera he was the ‘Woody Allen del business’. The laboratory met its demise with the end of the dot-com bubble in 2001 after five years in operation.

Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI)

De Brouwer stands at the helm of the European operations of the Hong Kong-based Emotiv Ltd., a company developing brain–computer interface based on electroencephalography(EEG) technology. Emotiv has a consumer version headset called EPOC, which controls games by the player's mind, and facial expressions.

Entrepreneurship

From 2003-2005 De Brouwer was the professor of Entrepreneurship at the International University of Monaco (now INSEEC) where he ran the boot camp ‘From zero to IPO’. In September 2004 he left Monaco for the University of Cambridge (UK) Judge Business School to become Entrepreneur In Residence[17] of the Center for Entrepreneurial Learning. His evernote-book ‘101 Things I Wish Somebody had Told me’ is free and available online for students.

Since 2009 De Brouwer is the Brussels director for the Silicon Valley-based Founder Institute. Both FI Brussels and Amsterdam have merged their portfolio’s of more than 40 graduated startups in the Lower Case Foundation, run by the former director of Sanoma Digital, Joris Van Heukelom[18].

Grassroots movements

De Brouwer is involved in various grassroots movements, most of which originated in the USA: the Founder Institute (Palo Alto, USA), the Quantified Self (San Francico, USA), Tau Zero Foundation (Ohio, USA), One Laptop Per Child (Cambridge, USA), Dance your PhD (Cambridge, USA) and the Long Now Foundation (San Francisco, USA). De Brouwer is the curator of TEDxBrussels and TEDxKids Brussels.

Physics & Space

Since 2003 Walter De Brouwer is a director of the Tau Zero Foundation, formerly known as NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program which recently published the state-of-the-art work The Frontiers of Propulsion Science. In 1998, De Brouwer organized the ‘First International Conference of Quantum Information and Computation’ at the Hotel Metropole in Brussels - sponsored by the European Office of Aerospace Research and Development of the United States Air Force. He also sponsored the Centre for Quantum Computation of the University of Oxford (United Kingdom).

Together with the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) Tau Zero started Project Icarus (the son of Project Daedalus) on September 30, 2009, to design an interstellar probe to go to Barnard's Star before the end of the 21st century. Icarus will utilize fusion based engine technology which would accelerate the spacecraft to close to 20% the speed of light.

Futurology

De Brouwer is regularly featured as a futurologist (see also: List of futurologists). For the 20th Anniversary Report (The World in 2023)[19] The Wall Street Journal Europe, tapped the brains of Walter De Brouwer, John Naisbitt and Shai Agassi. In 2010 Belgian TV RTBF profiled him in a documentary called AVENIR-Toekomst. De Brouwer claims to have served as a model for Hubertus Bigend, a character introduced in William Gibson's cyberpunk novels Pattern Recognition (2003) and Spook Country (2007)[20].

Education Theory

In 2008, Walter De Brouwer set up OLPC Europe, the European branch of (MIT Media Lab's) Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child. The foundation is located at the campus of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) in Belgium and collaborates with the King Baudouin Foundation.

De Brouwer is a member of the Education Board of the Lifeboat Foundation[21]. In 2011 he organized TEDxKids ‘What if TED would run your primary school?’ in Waterloo, Belgium, promoting a new curriculum based on ‘makers’, a West-Coast subculture, representing a technology-based extension of DIY culture: electronics, robotics, 3-D printing and hacking. The movement has started around MAKE (a magazine published since 2005 by O'Reilly Media) and the popular weblog Boing Boing. Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow has written a novel, Makers, which he describes as being "a book about people who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet."

Digital Biology

De Brouwer is the managing director of Benveniste Bio, the French quantum biology lab specialized in EM signatures of molecules in aqueous solutions. Benveniste Bio is the legacy of the late Jacques Benveniste, whose research has lately been supported by Luc Montagnier (2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, for his discovery of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)).

Honors, Awards and Positions

  • President of Royal Society of Arts Europe (2006–2008)
  • Founding Member of TEDGlobal (Oxford)
  • Member of TED (Long Beach)
  • Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA)
  • Professor of Entrepreneurship at the International University of Monaco (until 2004)
  • Knight ('Chevalier/Ridder') in the Order of Leopold (military)
  • De Brouwer was cited by Alan Barrell, holder of the Queen’s Medal for Enterprise Promotion, as a contributor to the future success of Silicon Fen: The Cambridge Phenomenon[22]
  • Member of the Lifeboat Foundation
  • Member of Discovery Channel and How Stuff Works group ‘Curiosity.com’

Personal life

Walter De Brouwer is married to Samia Lounis with whom he has two children, Lamara (1992) and Nelson (1999). He has a daughter, Barbara (1983) from a former marriage.

Bibliography

  • Notes & Queries: Mary Imlay, The Analytical Review (Oxford, 1982), 29: 204-206
  • Notes & Queries: Joshua Toulmin in The Analytical Review (Oxford, 1983), 30: 209-212
  • Computer Buzzwords (Wolters Leuven, 1984) ISBN 90-309-0815-7
  • Cybercrud (Wolters Leuven, 1985)
  • Het Nieuwe Landschap (Wolters Leuven, 1986) with Alex Vanneste (UFSIA)
  • 101 Things I Wish Somebody Had Told Me (Renting Eyeballs Entertainment, 2002)
  • The Biology of Language (University of Tilburg, 2005) ISBN 908100221X
  • Echelon: Three can keep a Secret, if Two of them are Dead (Delaware, 2004)
  • Free the Love Generation (London, 2005)
  • Flanders 2030 (Brussels, 2006)
  • Reality TV format 'Wannabe' (190154119) under management of Endemol (2009)

External links

Recent Lectures and Talks

References

  1. ^ http://uvtapp.uvt.nl/fswjpb/spits.nb_lib.frmToonMaandoverzicht?v_maand=9&v_jaar=2005
  2. ^ http://www.ua.ac.be/main.aspx?c=.ENGLISH&n=25878
  3. ^ http://www.monaco.edu/Faculty/faculty_over.php
  4. ^ http://info.emeraldinsight.com/products/journals/editorial_team.htm?PHPSESSID=4j767h7mctgrfs3lvt91k9tsd1&id=jce
  5. ^ http://www.pcmweb.nl/
  6. ^ http://www.behindthescene.org/person-128-en.html
  7. ^ http://www.behindthescene.org/person-128-en.html
  8. ^ http://www.alacrastore.com/storecontent/Thomson_M&A/EUnet_acquires_Ping-833485040
  9. ^ http://www.zuper.com/portfolio/riverland/r_r&d/index.html
  10. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20011024012123/starlab.org/about/beliefs/beliefscontent/01/01TowardsBlue.php3
  11. ^ http://www.quantumbionet.org/eng/index.php?pagina=70
  12. ^ http://www.space-time.info/starlab/gartner.html
  13. ^ ‘Fashion at the Edge: Spectacle, Modernity, and Deathliness’, C. Evans, pg. 276
  14. ^ http://web.archive.org/web/20010823073007/globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/article.html?id=010402010132&query=Starlab
  15. ^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X_HDSQXMI0
  16. ^ http://archives.cnn.com/2000/WORLD/europe/11/22/etime.tech/
  17. ^ http://www.cfel.jbs.cam.ac.uk/aboutus/entrepreneursresidence/debrouwerw.html
  18. ^ http://www.molblog.nl/bericht/joris-van-heukelom-begint-voor-zichzelf/
  19. ^ Wall Street Journal Europe. 20th Anniversary Report -- The World in 2023 --- Rise of the Machines --- Gazing Into the Future of Our Daily Lives. Dow Jones Factiva reference : wsje000020030124dz1o0000c By Christopher Knight, 24 January 2003
  20. ^ Numerous similarities: Wave Magazine (Node Magazine), Blue Ant (Starlab), age, county
  21. ^ https://lifeboat.com/ex/bios.walter.de.brouwer
  22. ^ ‘The Cambridge Phenomenon: The Power of Networking in Regional Economic Development’, 2008, Prof. A. Barrell

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