Just as the Silk Road was once the world's greatest trade route, the e-Road is poised to become the trading highway of the 21st Century.
This is the Bio I sent in for the SOA book. Despite the tongue-in-cheek tone, it's accurate.
Robin Bloor was born in Liverpool, England in the 1950s, a little too late to become member of The Beatles and, in any event, completely bereft of musical talent. In his late teens he went to Nottingham University, whose alumni include D H Lawrence and a vast array of prominent chemists. At Nottingham, he pursued neither literature nor chemistry. Instead, he acquired a degree in Mathematics, a love for computers and a number of severe hangovers.
Discovering, after a brief spell with an Insurance company, that he was never meant to be an actuary, he inflicted himself on the IT industry. He built commercial business applications for insurance companies and banks. Escaping from one role into another, he became in turn, a programmer, an analyst, a support technician, a project manager and a consultant. Eventually, for want of something better to do, he set up his own computer consultancy.
In the late 1980s, inspired by D H Lawrence, but covering quite different subject matter, he began writing articles for DEC User magazine in the UK and subsequently for DBMS magazine in the US. The consultancy that he had created, Bloor Research, gradually morphed into an IT analyst company and he started to spend more time writing about technology than making it work.
In April 1999 he published his first book, The Electronic B@zaar, which was about the dot com revolution. Much to his surprise it was a UK business best seller and was published a year later in the US, just as the dot com boom turned to bust. It received several accolades, being referred to as "a classic" by Publisher's Weekly in the US, but the market for such books had tanked.
Following in the steps of the Pilgrim Fathers, Robin emigrated to the US in 2002, but finding New England to be frostier than he had imagined, he settled in Texas. In 2003, for reasons beyond his comprehension, he was awarded an honorary Ph D in Computer Science, by Wolverhampton University in the UK in recognition of 'Services to the IT Industry'. In 2004 he became a partner in the noted IT analyst company, Hurwitz & Associates. In 2006, against his better judgment, he agreed to write a 'dummies' book with some of his partners in Hurwitz. Had that not been the case, you would not be reading these words.
