Detailed Background: Damon Torres

Please Note: most of the time spent over the last 20+ years has involved core information technology and digital media work for major companies, in example building and maintaining publishing networks for magazine companies, and creating a software product line for use by major portals. Much of this work was done with the help of a full -time staff that numbered between 4 and 22 employees consistently between 1992 and 2002, led by Damon Torres. The remainder were done independently by Damon Torres as either a sideline project or during brief periods of freelance and/or consulting work. Much of the technical core work that was the daily or weekly efforts of Damon and his staff is not represented here in this highlights bio that shows more of the range of activities, vs. the majority of activities, i.e. 6 years spent almost exclusively building software products of Damon's design for Robocast, Inc.

Since the birth of new media and personal computing Damon has been producing landmark events in publishing and broadcasting. He created music videos when MTV was about a year old, including several live performances of now platinum-level recording artists 10,000 Maniacs, and was shortlisted to be among MTV's second generation of VJs. Shortly after, by founding ExpoVideo, he created one of the world's first versions of Interactive TV by videotaping trade show demonstrations with a pro TV crew as a post show buying tool. His partners were the owners of PC Expo, a founder of PC Magazine, and his father, James C. Torres, a top exec at the NY Coliseum, the predecessor of Javits Convention Center.

During the beginning of the 9 years that Damon ran Nomad Multimedia (which later changed its name to I-Way), he helped create the first digital versions of logos for American Express and was on the production team that produced the US Soccer logo for our World Cup team. He personally has designed logos for the world's largest gothic cathedral and Earth Day NY, as well as having been on the design team that made the identity switch from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC.

Nomad had many long-term consulting projects, for example, building entire computer networks often from the ground up, for Welsh Publishing (The Disney Channel), Calvin Klien Cosmetics (owned by Unilever, a Fortune 500 company) and helping to outfit Esquire Magazine's first publishing network. Each of these assignments required specifying hardware, software and processes; training staff; and most of the time buying and installing the gear, from cabling through data back-up and offsite storage. Damon and his staff were on call round-the-clock at times for these major publishers. Training became a major part of Damon's work. To date he has trained approximately 2,000 professionals in digital publishing, both in small groups and large audiences of up to 500 attendees. Other projects involved multimedia, including a longform animated promo for the Interactive Information Expo, and supporting performance artist Laurie Anderson as she created her well-reviewed animations for her Thin Red Line tour.

He was hired by Roger Black and Terry McDonald, publishing legends, to be the digital production manager for Smart, the first consumer magazine to be made entirely using desktop computers. Top magazines made the switch to digital publishing, from pasteboards and stat cameras, lead by Damon's very hands-on guidance and training. These included: SPY (2 years as their part-time Art-Technology Manager), Esquire and The Simpsons  -- over two dozen magazines total -- including training the core staff of Ski, Redbook and Sports Illustrated to switch to Macs from typesetters and glue.

Damon has also done professional work as an illustrator, a photographer and a videographer. He and his team created the illustrations for several of Scholastic's popular book series The Animorphs which required photo research, photo shoot direction, high-end photo collage work, morphing from kids into animals, and production of movies of the morphs, which became flip book content shown in the corner of each novel. His other illustrations have appeared on thousands of t-shirts, in major magazines, and in prominent logos seen on TV and at major events.

Damon has a passion for video and film since his early days in the field at NYU's prestigious Film school where he majored in Film & TV production and direction. Damon produced and directed about a dozen cable TV shows, one which was a monthly series, while in college. Damon has been a crew member on several feature films and television shows, including Three Men and a Baby, Daredevil, Law and Order: Criminal Intent, and Angels in America, the award-winning TV miniseries. Damon has produced, directed, shot and edited many productions, including music videos, theatre and dance, and corporate work.  He has also created and exhibited avant garde video imagery which was featured in events at The Limelight nightclub. He edited music video collections for Rock America, a leading distributor to the night club and hotel industries. He produced and shot a video for New York City's Grace Church on 10th Street and Broadway that was hosted by his friend Ann Curry, anchor woman for the Today Show on NBC, which has been America's #1 morning show eight years in a row. In all, Damon has been a team member or a project leader on the creation of about a hundred video and/or film productions.

Regarding his online publishing work, Damon started The I-Way Company where he became the lead producer and designer of some of the world’s first Web sites, including a site for The Economist Magazine Group when there were only several hundred commercial sites on the Internet, and a large site for the French Government’s food and wine marketing group, one of the earliest food industry sites. Since that time he has produced and maintained sites for dozens of clients, including Toshiba, a Fortune 500 company, Earth Day, and Max Magazine (one of the largest monthly magazines in Europe at the time). Damon was also the lead producer of the first set of publicly distributed CD-ROMs for Toshiba Consumer Products. It was Toshiba and Phillips that co-invented the CD-ROM format.

Damon is also an inventor; having been the first to create automated browsing engines for the Web. He has filed for a patent that has recently been granted on this technology. This work enabled him to start and run Robocast, Inc. whose customers and partners included Hachette Fillipacchi, owner of hundreds of magazines and sites, including Premiere magazine (Robocast provided Oscars coverage), ZDNet's News.com (the largest tech news site at the time) and Microsoft, who has been in active discussions to buy the company.

As Robocast's CEO, Torres then hired a top team of programmers and professional services experts who wrote, designed and marketed 11 different software programs and service offerings as an Application Service Provider. Staff peaked at just 22 full-time employees, though they were in four time zones and in three countries. Over 450 custom Java classes were created to run on both Linux and Win NT, and were compatible with the leading Web browsers. This included browsers in the emerging mobile phone market, for which they created some of the first content, among them, a slideshow of MSNBC.com news headlines that you could receive on your phone's screen with just 1 click instead of the 33 clicks it usually took to retrieve about 10 story summaries.

They created similar experiences on the desktop, Robocast was the first to offer personalized content where you could automatically see your preferred pages for news, sports, weather, stocks, entertainment, shopping - even your clients and competitors sites - all with the use of a DVD-like set of controls. Wide-ranging 'RoboShows' were matched with 'Deep RoboShows' including the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition site that you could 'play' with 1 click instead of 384 clikcs.

Many other sites have added automated browsing to their offerings, including Google Video, Yahoo!, MSNBC, MSN, NYTImes.com, Myspace and Youtube, to name a few. They either offer automated playlists of video, or slideshows of text and images, some accompanied by audio, while others have offered web-based audio playlists for years.

Robocast survived the dot com downfall, outliving companies like Kozmo.com and WebVan which were founded after Robocast, who raised over $100 million and $1 billion respectively. Robocast did not, however, survive the skittish investor climate post 9/11/01, ceasing operations in January of 2002. The company is again exploring potential opportunities to monetize the patent.

Damon has been written about in the press dozens of times, including stories in the New York Times, Time magazine, and a cover story in the silicon alley tech finance magazine Alley Cat News in 2000 where he was named one of “the 25 most promising minority entrepreneurs in the NY metro area.” He has appeared on TV about a dozen times, including a feature on CNBCs “How to Succeed in Business” and a Wired magazine report where he was profiled as a pioneer in NYC's then newly named Silicon Alley.

Mr. Torres has frequently been a panelist, and on two occasions a keynote speaker, on the new media trade show circuit across the U.S. and internationally. After starting Nomad, he regularly taught and spoke at PC Expo and Multimedia Expo. While running I-Way, he introduced the World Wide Web to the country of Colombia for the first time, joined by one of the lead animators at Industrial Light and Magic as a fellow panelist in Bogota. As CEO of Robocast, Inc. Torres addressed approximately 100 "C-level" (CEO, CFO, CTO, etc.) magazine executives as a keynote speaker on the future of publishing.

With Damor Productions, Mr. Torres has worked on two feature films (Daredevil and Angels in America) for special effects shots. Damon has also served as the site manager and associate production manager for Public Works Inc. at major concerts and seminars, including several different shows that featured stars such as: P Diddy & Ashanti for a Hot 97 concert; George Benson & Natalie Cole; Jean Luc Ponty & Stanley Clarke for a 3-day CD101.9 jazz fest; and was instrumental in on-site production for a concert with Chuck Berry & 11 other bands at a four-stage festival. He has helped run emergency preparedness workshops for the Red Cross in lower Manhattan.

As a multimedia producer, Mr. Torres has programmed CD-ROMs for the National Blueberry Council and Florida Tomatoes, and has managed the Web sites of mushroom and prosciutto marketers for a well-respected PR firm and design group. He has created sites for bands, software start-ups and environmental groups. He has also handled design and production of a large scale public art show for Earth Day projected onto the vast atrium of Grand Central Terminal, now in its third year. He has designed banner ads for media giant BMG, including promos for Elvis Presley, Hall & Oates and Lou Reed. He was named Executive Producer of Ferry Fest 100 celebrating the centennial of the Staten Island Ferry from October 2005 to October 2006.

Currently, Damon is devoting all of his work time to pursuing the goals of Robocast, Inc. and the playlist patent. He has founded Interactive Media Universe LLC ("IMU") to own his controlling share of Robocast, Inc. IMU is helping Robocast to prepare for the IP management marketplace.

Updated August 1, 2007