Mike Yacavone

"Many people ask 'Is technology useful?', but a better question would be 'Does technology make our jobs easier, faster, more profitable and more fun?' Building a product is easy; building the right product takes more thought."

Mike Yacavone is a product and service design specialist and customer-centered technologist. He's developed four end-user software products, all praised for their ease of use and reliable day-to-day operation. In the early 1990s Mike developed a Customer Relationship Management application for small business and a sophisticated Mass Customization bill-of-materials application. He also designed a cross-platform engineering specification program, and a powerful yet easy-to-use automated web publishing system. Prior to his software experience, Mike was a lead integration engineer at a venture-backed company developing ink-jet printing technology for customers such as Apple, Polaroid, Xerox, Hewlett-Packard, Tektronix, Brother, and others. In the early 1980s Mike invented and patented a multi-channel audio system that pre-dated home theater by 15 years. Mike has been using the Internet daily since 1988, and started constructing websites in late 1993, eventually founding XeniumGroup, an Internet strategy/design/build firm. As part of this work Mike wrote, reviewed and consulted on several business plans for Internet startups. He has also studied depth psychology for over 20 years, which proves unusually helpful in product design.

Mike holds a B.S. in Experimental Psychoacoustics from Syracuse University, and is a member of the Direct Marketing Association, the Association for Interactive Media, and the Audio Engineering Society. He is an elected Board member of the Hanover Consumer Cooperative Society, Inc., a member-owned cooperative grocery business with annual revenues of $39 million. He lives with his wife, Lynne Walker, and spends free time playing with digital photography and listening to music on laboratory-quality sound systems.