I think it’s time to archive the hagiography that was on my About page. I apologize if you were duped or offended by it. Anyway, you should know better than to take any piece of text containing the phrase ‘thought leader’ seriously.
I think it’s still pretty fun, so I’m archiving it here as a quote:
Alper Çuğun is an engineer of the user experience specialized in cutting edge web technology, data viualization, physical interaction, game design and location based services.
Incredibly well connected within the tech scene but also always looking beyond the edges. He is known and respected among his peers, the most innovative web denizens, both locally and abroad and is responsible for startups, high quality writing, business innovation and winning numerous competitions.
Education
He graduated from Delft, University of Technology —a no nonsense engineering university colloquially known as the school of Getting Things Done— on the topic of crowd-sourcing avant-la-lettre. His curriculum of Media and Knowledge Engineering was comprised of a thorough foundation of computer science, signal processing, compression, computer graphics, data visualization, statistics, data mining, information retrieval, 3d programming and assorted other courses along with a solid minor of business courses in Management of Technology.
This solid grounding at one of the most respected technical universities of the world and the manner of thought acquired there have continued to serve Alper well throughout his professional and personal endeavours.
Early career
Already being well situated in the local and European web scenes after finishing university Alper went straight into freelancing for Aardverschuiving Media without an intermediate period of corporate mind numbing. Trying to find a good position to innovate the web from Delft, he also opened a coworking office for a year that became a hub for the local freelance community —he also started Dutch coworking map Coworker.nl together with Robert Gaal— shortly after which he moved to the greener pastures of Amsterdam.
Alper is also a founding member of Dutch finance startup Tipit.to a small corporation that has transformed thinking on crowdsourced micropayments and despite struggles with Paypal has financed Wikileaks among other public initiatives.
Thought leadership
Alper regularly exchanges ideas with industry thought leaders both in and out of Europe by visiting the best conferences and meeting up with the acest of web people.
The blog Alper writes on this site is a long running mainstay of the Dutch blogosphere and it continues to be a widely respected peripatetic rumination on the intersection of design, technology and society in the broadest sense.
Alper and Robert Gaal‘s nose for up and coming web trends enabled them to scout the fresh startup Foursquare and bring it to its first international outing in Amsterdam shortly after its 2009 SxSWi launch. They both remain set to this day both on founding, finding and befriending the web’s next hottest startups.
Alper’s newest foray is Monster Swell an agency to aid people, corporations and governments in making sense of vast quantities of data using statistical analysis, user experience design and data visualization. Never content to settle for yesterday’s status quo Alper is determined to stay at the forefront of the technological wave.
Extra curriculum
An avid cultural consumer of the most eclectic of offerings as well as a longtime runner, capoeirista and occasional surfer, Alper Çuğun is a modern day renaissance man in both mind and body.
Alper is also well represented on the following web properties: Twitter, LinkedIn, Flickr, Anobii, Dopplr, last.fm and Delicious.
