About (English)

MattHi there, and welcome. And because Google needs my full name in order to give me ranking cred, I go by Matthew Romaine.

I’m a bi-cultural tech nut who thoroughly enjoys music (well, everything except Country Western), the outdoors, and nurturing technology. At the moment I live in Tokyo, where I once attended A.S.I.J. from 1st to 9th grade. Other places I have lived include London, England where I attended pre-school at ASL, Massachusetts for a few years (Boston, where I was born and, later, Andover where I attended high school), Providence, Rhode Island where I studied Computer Science and Music for four years at Brown, and Stanford, California for a year at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA).

Since my return to Tokyo in the fall of 2002 I have been working for Sony Corporation in a number of capacities. I started off as an audio research engineer in their Broadband Applications Laboratories building microphone arrays and multi-channel speaker configurations for video conferencing and entertainment applications. I then transferred to the Audio Codec Development Group where I created a real-time network streaming protocol for the next generation ATRAC audio codec and pushed through an IETF RFC draft while developing a working demo. When Howard Stringer was appointed CEO, I was asked to join the Corporate Technology Division in headquarters to help facilitate discussions between the Japanese engineers and American (or should I say, “English speaking”) top management.

I had some down time about a year into joining the Audio Codec guys, so I spent some time moonlighting for samurai.fm, an internet radio startup founded by an engineer living in Tokyo and a “content guy” now living in England. My functions included expanding the revenue streams by bringing in clients around a b2b model, and seeking (angel) funding. Unfortunately talks with investors fizzled when the inevitable “equity stake” issue arose, so I’ve since moved myself to the sidelines to observe the station’s growth.

In June of 2006 I decided to part ways with Sony to recharge my batteries and enjoy some traveling before figuring out my next big career step. Most recently I visited Cuba (just before Fidel was hospitalized, phew!)

That’s all I want to share for now while I bring my blog and website back up to speed. Feel free to ping me about anything at mromaine[at]gmail[dot]com. You may also view my profiles at some of the popular SNS sites, including:

My online stati (is that a word?) are as follows:

skype status matt.romaine
AIM icon groovyquanza
204816 (yup, a super early adopter :)