Welcome to the Soundbreeze Enterprises blog. Soundbreeze Enterprises is my consulting business. The blog is more a personal writing and commentary outlet than a corporate communications one.
The Soundbreeze concept was created in the late 1980s when, as a weather hobbyist in high school, I tracked onshore winds off Long Island Sound. An annual picnic called Soundbreezefest ran from 1989-1992, the soundbreeze.com domain was registered in 1994, and Soundbreeze Enterprises grew out of various consulting engagements in 1999.
In 1990, I created Yale University's first online weather service. This forecast featured pinpoint temperature predictions for specific campus locations and I marketed it as "just for Yale." The service, updated four times a day, also featured numerous pages explaining the effects of national and regional weather patterns on New Haven weather. Yale had been looking for a feature on its campus information system that would induce people to become regular users. The strategy appeared to work; the weather service ranked #1 in popularity every week for three and a half years while total system traffic also soared.
Shortly after creating this service, I realized that once the initial work was done to create the forecast for New Haven, distributing it through other campus media outlets was easy. After all, the predictions were the same regardless of how the information was distributed. By 1992, my weather predictions were featured on the Yale online campus information service, on WYBC-FM radio, on a telephone hotline, and in both the Yale Daily News and the weekly Yale Herald.
After graduating in 1994, I joined The Pipeline, the Internet service provider founded by author James Gleick. As its sixth employee, I managed customer service and the development of the Pipeline for Macintosh software. When PSINet acquired The Pipeline in 1995 and expanded the service nationally and into the U.K., I managed the service's local community features such as interest-specific newsgroups and celebrity guest appearances. I continued to direct customer communications, explaining new technologies like Web browsing, new member benefits resulting from our local partnership marketing efforts, and, of course, finding a spin for the occasional screw-up such as double-billing 20,000 customers. I also represented The Pipeline in a CBS "48 Hours" segment about the Internet in 1995. During my time there, The Pipeline's membership grew from 2,000 to 105,000 and its remnants today are part of EarthLink.
From 1997-1999, I worked in marketing communications at an e-business consulting firm called Transaction Information Systems (now Starpoint Solutions). I wrote many of the case studies, press releases, white papers, and Web pages explaining how clients were saving millions of dollars from new workflow and information management technologies. Terms such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Java were new at the time, and they required clever ways to convince a bank or pharmaceutical company to spend $1 million to save $5 million. During my free time I followed technology company press releases and became fascinated with the ways they controlled and spun information.
At NYU Law School, I found a home in the terrific NYU Center for Law and Business, headed by William Allen, and focused much of my studies on corporate restructurings, corporate finance and securities law. While in law school, I spent two years covering sports, restaurants, music and nightlife for New York Today, the online city guide from The New York Times. I also helped the cool people at Jungle Media Group launch Jungle Law (formerly JD Jungle) and wrote Jungle's online taxation and antitrust practice area guides. After a rewarding summer associate experience and a year or so doing litigation, corporate and securities work, I returned almost full time to the business side in 2003 when small businesses came back to life.
Today, this blog reflects just about all of my interests including business, music, food, marketing, law, sports, technology, and of course, the weather.
--RJK, November 2004
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