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Bio

Page history last edited by Tara Brown 12 years, 4 months ago

About.me

 

Tara "Tiger" Brown has designed, developed and led innovative software development projects for 15 years.  Throughout her career, Tara has always utilized bleeding-edge technology and stayed current with emerging concepts.  Her primary focus has always been on excellent user experience, anywhere data access, online communities, and open platforms.

 

Tara recently left Topspin, a technology platform for direct-to-fan, marketing, management and distribution, where she was an Account Manager and worked directly with musicians and their staff to implement campaigns.  Prior to that she was a Senior Program Manager where she designed and managed features, and kicked off the Development Partner Program allowing third-party developers to innovate on the Topspin platform.

 

Prior to Topspin, Tara worked at Microsoft for 8 years as a Senior Lead Program Manager, where she led software projects for Windows Live and Office Live. Projects included Windows Live Calendar, Address Book, Microsoft Office Outlook Connector,  Microsoft Office Live for Small Business  where she led a team that managed international mobile features and the development partner program, and Microsoft Office Live Workspace where she led a team that worked on social productivity.  Her extracurricular activities at Microsoft included being on the Women's Leadership Team, working on internal startups with other entrepreneurial women, and mentoring.

 

After graduating from British Columbia Institute of Technology, Tara started a software consulting company and single-handedly designed and built large Intranet and Extranet projects for Group Health Cooperative and BCAA's 24 service centers.  She lead a project team that built one of the first web-based auto insurance quoting systems - with much of the design being used over a decade later.

 

In her spare time, Tara has produced projects such as iPhun, an iPhone game review show, where gamers reviewed games in video and blog format.  She founded BarCampSeattle, helped organize BarCampLA and talked at conferences such as SXSW Interactive.   She has been a highly sought after beta tester for productivity and social tools which helps her to stay current and engaged in the software community.

 

 

LinkedIn Profile

 

The long of it:

It all started when I got my Pong Machine. From there I got an Intellivision, then a PC. Jr which gave me my first taste of social networking with Bulletin Boards and got all my tips for the Sierra’s Quest Series (esp. King’s Quest).  My uncle had Atari so I played Pole Position a lot and got my exercise with my Nintendo Power Pad.  Of course the rest of the consoles followed like SEGA, Playstation, Nintendo 64, etc.  In High School I played around a little with DOS and QBasic. The other day an old friend reminded me that we used to secretly trade floppy disks under the desk b/c it just wasn’t cool. 

 

In college, I got a taste of Gopher and Veronica but didn’t know how that was going to help me get a job, so I decided that consulting was where it was at and joined Yaletown Technology, a data warehousing consulting firm.  I was a sysadmin for email, time tracking system and also did project mgmt and dev’d some web applications for Group Health Cooperative.  I decided that I hated the company webpage and decided to re-build it and after quickly becoming tired of notepad, discovered Vermeer’s FrontPage. I had the fun experience of figuring out how to get Exchange up and running in the Vancouver and Kirkland offices and move the mail over from the Sun machine. After a couple of years I moved over to BCAA and built out an Intranet for their 24 service centers across the province of B.C. I also implemented their Document Management System and Project Managed their online insurance quoting system.  Then, one rainy day in May 2000, I got a call asking if I wanted to interview at Microsoft in sunny California. I looked outside and said “yes!”. 

 

I got the job at MSN Calendar down at SVC but actually started working on MSN Address Book. That project got transferred to Redmond and so I worked on MSN Calendar DAV for the MSN Client. I tried out Hailstorm for awhile then worked on Intellisync for MSN, and then got asked to work on Outlook Connector (OLC).   I was a bit homesick for Vancouver, B.C. and wanted to experience the mother ship so I moved to Redmond. I worked briefly on the MSN Messenger team focusing on the OLC and Small Business and then was asked if I wanted to join the MSN Small Business team.  From there Office Live was formed and I’ve been on Small Business for almost 3 years focusing on the Business Applications. In December 2007 I transitioned to Microsoft Office Live Workspace focusing on Social Productivity in Office. 

 

After 8 years at Microsoft I decided to take my career in a new direction and worked as a Program Manager and Account Manager at Topspin Media for almost 2 years.

 

Currently I am taking some time to raise my son Ripley and figuring out what's next.

 

  

BTW: I AM CANADIAN from Langley, B.C. If you are also a Canuck or just love Canadians, be sure to let me know!! 

 

I uploaded my Insights Discovery profile which will give you a pretty accurate insight into my behavior!

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