October Featured Techie: Kevin Hughes

I was introduced to Kevin four years ago by my good friend Olin Lagon. It was immediately apparent Kevin possessed a rare combination of technical skills and a keen aesthetic sense. Kevin doesn't program UIs, he sculpts them. One of the best examples of Kevin’s superb UI work is SproutBuilder. There are quite a few Flash widget builders out there but SproutBuilder really stands out as a quality product more akin to an Adobe desktop application than a typical Web 2.0 app. It is with great pleasure that we announce Kevin as October's Featured Techie.

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Kevin Hughes is an internationally-recognized pioneer in Web design and software. Hughes started Hawaii's first Web server at Honolulu Community College in May of 1993 and soon joined Enterprise Integration Technologies (EIT) in Palo Alto, California as their Webmaster. EIT was acquired by VeriFone and then bought by Hewlett-Packard in 1997. One of only six members of the World Wide Web Hall of Fame, in March of 1994 Hughes was presented the award by Tim-Berners Lee (the recognized inventor of the Web) at the First International World Wide Web conference in Geneva.
Hughes has worked with the World Wide Web Consortium on the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) standard and holds three patents for the interface for VeriFone's vWallet, their consumer wallet application. He also developed "imagemap", which allows images on the Web to have multiple clickable regions, the icons for the Apache Web server, and the logo for the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). Hughes' many other "firsts" include:
1. First campus-wide information service on the Web (Honolulu Community College)
2. First online cable TV listings on the Web (for the Jones Cable Network)
3. First shopping site (for the Internet Shopping Network)
4. First site for CommerceNet, the first ecommerce consortium
5. Interface for the first XML-based procurement system (with NTT)
6. Interface for the first business-to-business trading portal (MarketSite.net)
7. First Web presence for Wells Fargo and BankOne (now CitiBank)

Until 2002 Kevin Hughes was a Senior Software Engineer for Commerce One in Cupertino, California, where he helped develop the core software architecture for their platform. That year he became the youngest recipient of the University of Hawaii's Distinguished Alumni Award. Since then he has co-founded two Honolulu startups, ChipIn (chipin.com) and Sprout (sproutbuilder.com), and is committed to helping make Hawaii's dot-com industry flourish.