About Bob Dunn
I’m a writer and Internet technology entrepreneur, living with my wife and two youngest children on something less than an acre of South Texas land bumping up against the Brazos River in Richmond.
I grew up in Ohio, where most of my family remains, and settled here after spending a couple of decades as a newspaper nomad, which is also how I met my wife. I’ve served in various reporting, editing and management roles at publications in six states.
In the late ’90s, when it became apparent to me newspapers were going away and never coming back, I was fortunate enough to join some remarkably creative people tinkering at interesting Internet ventures for the likes of Cox Media and Time Warner, before managing a web development firm and then founding a database applications company that still serves Houston’s petroleum and medical industries.
By this time my wife and I had abandoned what was (for me) the claustrophobic confines of Houston in favor of Fort Bend County to the south – a mixture of vast suburban developments and pockets of semi-rural space, some of the latter of which we began occupying. Despite its size (population: 535,000), Fort Bend had no dominant media outlet, therefore I felt compelled to see whether one or two people could provide a public service and make a living by breaking local news stories on the web as quickly as possible as they occurred in real life.
We achieved a loyal following along with our public-service goals, but making money slinging news and selling ads at the same time was just the sort of tall order small publishers have struggled with since forever. After about two and a half years, I sold FortBendNow, but agreed to continue working for the new owners for a few months.
Since then I have started a new company, Riveredge Ventures, which builds great-looking, pre-crafted web sites containing a variety of tools intended to serve specific business segments. One of these “segments” is local political candidates, which we serve through our VoteBooster division.
When I’m not tidying up computer code or sizing photos for a new web site, you might find me puttering around my fruit trees and vegetable garden, or smoking the occasional chicken.
Questions? Comments? Feel free to contact me anytime via email.
→ B.Dunn, Jan 01, 2010, 04 41 am
