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Doug Lerner, Pacific Rim Focus

Doug earned his M.S. in physics at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and did further post-graduate work at the University of California Davis and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories. He has over 20 years of experience in higher education, large program management, student advisement, course development, technical training, project management, and also software development for online education, social networks, online communities and scientific simulation.

For 14 years at Nippon Electronics College, Doug lectured in Mathematics and Scientific Simulation in the Department of Computer Graphics, where he also served as the Director of the Virtual Reality Seminar program.

Doug's Japanese is proficient to the extent that he is able to lecture entirely in Japanese and conduct oral and written daily business in Japanese.

Although a U.S. citizen, since 1983 he has resided in Tokyo, where he holds permanent residency. During his first 7 years in Japan, he worked for Fujitsu, the largest computer company in Japan. There he was Technical Director in charge of a development staff of over 50 people for Fujitsu's 1990 Osaka World's Fair Omnimax/IMAX production "Echoes of the Sun".

After Fujitsu, Doug founded Elliptics, Ltd., which provides software development, education services and web application development services. KK Elliptics in Japan was formed to facilitate working with clients in Japan.

Since 2000, through Elliptics, Doug's work has centered on two main activities: (1) Education and Training and (2) Web Application Development.

As Director of Eduction for Web Crossing, Inc., he was in charge of developer and customer training and professional seminars. This involved developing, arranging and conducting multi-day seminars in key locations around the world, as well as on-site training sessions at customer locations in London, Brighton, Shanghai, Toronto, New Zealand, Seattle, Boston, Princeton, San Francisco, San Jose and Saint Louis. Customers included Adobe, Intuit, Apple, Cisco, Edmunds, Harlequin, Guardian Newspapers, Waikato University, IDS at the University of Sussex and many others.

Doug was also the chief developer for Web Crossing of the “Neighbors” social networking system and the “Campus Crossing” online education system, as well as many other online web applications.

Sue Boettcher, U.S. Focus
Sue has a "Jill of all Trades" skillset including web and mobile software development, design and interactive multmedia, community and social networking consultation, writing feature articles, technical writing, and English-language voice-overs for the Japanese market. Sue has a degree in Education, has taught at the college level and has worked with Doug on professional seminars for Web Crossing.

Software development:
Sue has built numerous web sites, both as a freelancer and as part of Web Crossing's professional services team. Sue worked on a variety of database-integrated web sites, for mom-and-pop clients as well as "big name" customers. Sue's specialization is front-end - user interface - but she is also proficient in "geek level" backend code. She architected and developed Web Crossing's Plugin architecture and many of the available plugins, including weblogs and project management.

In summer 2008, Sue and Doug wrote their first iPhone applications for Elliptics.

Community consultant:
Sue has 15 years of experience building and administering online communities. In 1993 she helped build AOL's first women's area. In 1997 she and a partner created Women2Women, a thriving community of women still going strong. In 1995 Sue created the first email list for her allied health professionals' group and grew it to several thousand members. In 2000 Sue went to work at Web Crossing as Director of Community Development.

Writer:
With Doug, Sue wrote "The Non-Programmer's Guide to Web Crossing." In the late 90s, she wrote a series of articles called "40 and more" for Digital City, San Francisco, and in 2001, a series of feature articles about community and online communication.

Design and interactive multmedia:
In 2000 Sue completed a certificate in interactive multimedia, including projects in Flash, Authorware, Director, Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects and Premiere.