About Me

My name is Jonathan Karon. I am a product architect and software engineer with extensive customer-facing experience on consumer, youth, corporate IT, legal, charitable, political, government, retail, hospitality, and marketing products and services. My projects span desktop, web, and mobile software that touches on graphics and multimedia, mapping, geospatial, data viz, databases, systems integration, operating systems, social networking, e-commerce, financial processing, APIs, affiliate platforms, artificial intelligence, emergency planning and response, SMS and push messaging, collaboration, and enterprise technologies. I have designed and implemented full-stack software using C, C++, LAMP, PHP, Python/Django, MySQL, Postgres, .Net/C#, SQL Server, iPhone and iPad, and ESRI ArcGIS; and have written extensions, plugins, or internals for most.

Notable Projects

Project WeetWoo! Kid-Safe Videos
Client Self-Published
Link www.weetwoo.com

Co-designed, implemented, and published a multi-award winning video player for iPhone that provides curated YouTube content in a kid-friendly app. Widely recognized as the best app in it's class, WeetWoo proved that parents were willing to pay a premium for a well designed video experience.

Project GivingSphere
Client Social Financial, Inc.
Link www.givingsphere.com

CTO and lead engineer implementing the GivingSphere donation processing platform. Projects included multiple prototype web site builds, prototype mobile app design and build, implementation of an innovative tracking and accounting platform for donation processing, authoring patent applications, interfacing with legal teams for federal clearance, evolving business model and working with business and marketing teams.

Project Oregon Hunting Access Map
Client Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife; Gartrell Group
Link www.oregonhuntingmap.com

Implemented front-end for a map mash-up providing easy access to information on hunting access areas in Oregon using Google Maps, ESRI ArcServer, and various state databases. Project has generated multiple millions of dollars in incremental revenue for the state while increasing access to, and stewardship of, legal hunting areas.

Project EsKort
Client Animus Rex
Link www.animusrex.com/eskort/

Architected a PHP / MySQL content management system and lightweight application server for standardizing Animus Rex's highly interactive, content-driven web site business. Successfully designed solutions for scalability, cacheing, backup, enterprise integration, managed hosting, content syndication, and APIs. EsKort has been used to build and deploy dozens of highly interactive web sites and intranets for global-scale, high-profile law firms and foundations.

Project Tsunami Casualty Study
Client Cannon Beach, Oregon
Link www.tappister.com/cannon-beach/

Worked with city officials and community members to define project scope and details. Implemented a comprehensive tsunami casualty simulator that incorporates CFD-derived time-series wave inundation models, refugee routing and evacuation simulators, and wave casualty model to understand the dynamics of timing and routing in coastal emergency evacuations. Used the simulator to analyze the relative merits of various disaster mitigation projects the city was considering and wrote and presented findings to city council and emergency preparedness advisory group.

Follow-up work using the simulator to study the March 2011 Tohoku tsunami in Japan was recently featured on a Discovery Channel special report: Daily Planet Special Report

Project MSIIA
Client The MITRE Corporation; United States Air Force / United Nations

Worked on an R&D team inventing geospatial-driven systems for intelligence analysts to improve utilization of existing multi-source electronic intelligence. MSIIA integrated visual and thermal satellite, first-generation Predator surveillance, HUMINT, and multi-agency deployed asset databases into a visual analysis platform. System was deployed to United Nations operations bases in Europe in support of various peace-keeping missions.

Project Emergency Management Integrated Technology Concept
Client The MITRE Corporation

Worked on an R&D team developing the first real-time mobile collaboration platform. Connected tablet computers and Apple Newtons with CDPD cellular modems and GPS receivers to a GIS system and real-time communications platform. The command and control platform integrated municipal GIS data, US Census data, personnel and equipment data, narrowcast and broadcast communications, and mobile devices to demonstrate a vision for next-generation emergency response systems. This work, done in 1998, laid the groundwork for an array of mobile-local-social technologies that have emerged since.