An Army captain with twelve years of experience in Swedish journalism, I work for the very nice company Ericsson, and I became our representative in the W3C Advisory Committee in May 2000. I have been managing a project in Japan until January 2002, and now coordinate information and content technology projects in Stockholm, Sweden. No offers below a hundred grand, please if you want my services.
My career on the web started in 1994. I fell in love with Mosaic, and immediately realized that I had to be there - this was the future happening beneath my feet.
So I quit a comfortable job as a the editor in chief of a small magazine, and decided to invest my time in web development. Unfortunately, me and the financier didn't agree (he later went broke, so I was right), but meanwhile, I had written the first book about the Internet in Swedish. This landed me a job at Bonnier Affärsinformation, the largest publisher of business information in Scandinavia, as an Internet technician. You were a god if you could spell TCP/IP in those days.
I kept at it, butting my head bloody against the internal bureaucracy, struggling with nitwit journalists who dimly realized their traditional way of life was threatened (and having some great time with others, who managed to expand their minds). I finally succeeded in getting resources together to start a small research lab, to look a few years into the future. This was partly the result of the On the Move project, an EU project which may not have resulted so much in actual products as in culture shock. For the publishers.
The Bonnier Media Lab had just got going when it was closed. The Bonnier Group stupidly decided to shut down all non-profit making Internet activities. Two years later they decided to start the exactly same thing again! So I was right there, too.
Quite suddenly, I found myself an independent author again. For three weeks, because I then put in a call to a friend at Ericsson, asking if they had any interesting jobs. And lo, they actually needed someone to go to W3C in Boston. I quickly found an issue that would be interesting to work with, and that was not addressed enough, in mine and the Ericsson view: Mobility and HTTP, and the future of mobility and the web. So I asked to be able to do that - and I got it.
I lived in Boston for two years, a visiting researcher at MIT, working hard at the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, where I have chaired the CC/PP Working Group, trying to define a universal profile mechanism for information appliances and contextual information (and as many other buzzwords as you can think of), work with web characterization when I can, and also attempt to continue the convergence between the W3C and the WAP Forum, where I also do some CC/PP related work. In November 1999, I was appointed a W3C Fellow. Among other things, I organized a workshop on position-dependent information services in February 2000. In May 2000, I became the representative for Ericsson in the W3C Advisory Committee, where I am now helping build the mobile Internet strategy of Ericsson.
For a little more than a year after that, I got to live in Japan and manage a research group looking into the next generation of iMode and related technologies. Now, I have moved back to Sweden, where I am coordinating projects related to information and content technologies within Ericsson Research.
I was involved in the CONDRINET study of the European Commission, trying to find out the future of content-based electronic publishing; and I was part of the reference groups for Anyware, a Swedish media lab, now Interaktiva Institutet, as well as the School for IT researchers of the Swedish foundation for Competence and Knowledge Development (it's a lot shorter in Swedish). I have also been part of the Registry Advisory Board of NSI, now not necessary since ICANN and NSI made up.
In my spare time (what there is of it), I am on the advisory board for Crisp Productions, a build-operate-transfer creator of MVNO:s. They are going through a very interesting phase right now. I also help the Swedish Institute for Ethics with technical expertise.
I am also a prolific writer, having written six books in Swedish, just done with the tenth (Location Dependent Services for the Wireless Web, published in February 2002 by John Wiley and Sons) and hard at work on the eleventh. You can e-mail me at johan.hjelm@42forlag.com if you want to have a private conversation. No advertising, please. And please note that these pages is a work in progress. I also have investments in various home cleaning companies around the world. I will update them when I have time and/orfeel like it, and if you have complaints, they had better be well founded. I will not listen to PR people complaining that they feel their companies have been unfairly treated.