Bio
Justin Kruger is a creative and entrepreneurial technologist and has been working as an engineer for over 8 years. While in high school, he started the chess club and the robotics club competing in Dean Kamen’s US First Competition (http://usfirst.org ). He also participated in sports and on several academic teams. In technology he got his start while still in High School at the age of 17 working for an upcoming technology consulting company as a draftsman, programmer and recruiter. He remembers making cold calls (sometimes even to the deceased, which were never fun and a bit awkward), interviewing people, and booking contracts with companies like Abbott, and Baxter. Ever since Justin has worn multiple hats as a designer, engineer, entrepreneur, and community builder building the success of everyone around him.
Justin has so much passion for technology that he has been involved in at least 5 startups, and is determined to one day succeed. He had hoped that his startup Social Helix would succeed, however he and his cofounder found themselves moving from Milwaukee, WI to San Francisco California during the worst recession in over 70 years to raise funds. Justin quickly got a contract at Hi5.com to pay the bills, while his cofounder Jon Thoms took a job at Playdom.com. Justin was later recruited to work for MySpace in LA in December 2008 to work on OpenID.
For the last 3 years Justin has been working in Social Media and has developed a core expertise in Social Media, and Open Identify systems. In 2006 he founded barcampMilwaukee, an un-conference that networks technology professionals over an intense 56 hour continuous event running through the night. The barcampMilwaukee.com site had to hyper network people over a short period of time so that the participants of the un-conference could change what the conference was about on the fly. Often times participants in barcampMilwaukee would work on a project through the night to produce a working tech demo of something the next day. His work on barcampMilwaukee lead to Manpower International asking Justin in 2007 to help them develop http://secondlife.manpower.com a site that was going to serve as Manpower’s portal to the ‘Virtual World of Work.’ The ‘Virtual World of Work’ was an ambitious plan to revolutionize the way we bill for time, work, and learn new skills. Working for Manpower got Justin started in Social Media and transitioned him from his work in the biotech, medical and financial industries; while giving him an insight to the Social Media needs of Fortune 500 companies.
In December of 2008, Justin joined MySpace to build the MySpaceID product. MySpaceID serves as an OpenID provider that allows MySpace to make it’s Social APIs available to 1st, , 2nd, and 3rd party apps/ sites, while giving users the ability to manage the privileges those apps have to their photos, friends and other social data. MySpaceID supports the open standards behind OAuth, and OpenID 2.0 while competing directly with Facebook Connect. Justin’s work for MySpaceID was demoed live at the Spring 2009 DEMO as MySpace’s flagship feature, and his last work at MySpace just launched in fall 2009 under the name MySpace JSL ( javascript library ).
Today, Justin is consulting, and working on a few social media side projects that might turn into a new startup or two.