Howdy, I’m Paul (but most people call me Stammy). I am a 24 year old web developer, technology aficionado, startup guy or whatever else you want to call me. All I know is that I love learning and working with new technology. I am currently Co-Founder at Notifo, a mobile notifications platform.
I am a citizen of both the United States and Greece, the latter of which tried their best to conscript me to the army. I was born in Houston and moved to Atlanta in 2004 to get my Bachelor’s in Computational Media from Georgia Tech. After graduating with honors in 2008, I stuck around (largely in part to the Georgia Tech Edison Fund) to work on a startup I cofounded, Skribit. In May 2010, I sold all of my possessions and left Georgia with six figures of debt (mostly out-of-state tuition) and drove to San Francisco to live near friends and seek out new opportunities. You can read all about my journey in Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country.
Technology is my passion. I started with hardware when I was young, designing and building small circuits for fun; I built a PBASIC-coded small autonomous robot for my 7th grade science fair project and an alarm system complete with infrared motion detection for my 8th grade science fair project. I progressed to building, modifying and overclocking computers. I once held a top 20 spot for fastest computer in the 3DMark01 benchmarking suite and had won numerous case modding and timed PC building contests. Around the time that I began college, I started realizing the power of the web and turned my interests towards the Internet and web applications.
I started this blog in 2005 to share my knowledge of technology with others and learn from readers. It has grown substantially since its humble beginnings as a small blog hosted on a Mac Mini in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff dorms. PaulStamatiou.com focuses on technology that interests me personally and generally focuses on reviews, tutorials and editorials about whatever is bouncing around in my mind at the moment. This blog currently makes enough money to pay my rent and some utility bills, which helps me focus on building out my startup.
Subscribe
If you would like to stay up-to-date with this blog, please subscribe via RSS or email. I generally publish in-depth articles about once a week, although it would be my dream to be able to post everyday.
Things I’ve Done
In the last few years, I have done some interesting things…
- Nike featured me in my own commercial for the Nike Plus.
- This blog was at one point the #1 Google result for “Paul” and a top 100 blog on Technorati.
- One bored weekend I developed a site called flickrSLiDR that solved the problem associated with difficulties of embedding Flickr slideshows. I promoted it over the course of 2 months and it went went viral. I then sold it for several grand.
- I was selected out of over 4,000 applicants to help Ford promote their 2011 Ford Fiesta, as a FiestaMovement Agent.
- I attended and covered the Detroit Auto Show, a DARPA Urban Challenge event in Pittsburgh and the final Challenge X competition on behalf of General Motors.
- I interned for Yahoo! in Sunnyvale, California in 2006 and developed the first version of their corporate blog, Yodel Anecdotal. Here’s the news on TechCrunch.
- I spoke at the TTI/Vanguard Generation Techs conference in Rome, Italy.
- Georgia Tech honored me with their Success Beyond the Campus Award.
- I used to work full-time on developing and promoting Skribit, a startup based around my idea that launched at Startup Weekend Atlanta.
- I accomplished my 2010 New Year’s Resolution in just under 3 months. I wanted to shed a few pounds gained from working on my computer all the time. I ended up going from 168 pounds to 142 with healthy eating and exercise.
- And probably a few more I’m forgetting..
Nerdy Bits
I read YCombinator Hacker News daily and am a startup advocate. I am a Mac user and before that I had become accustomed to Gentoo Linux. While I don’t consider myself a programmer, designer or sysadmin, I know my way around a terminal and know a thing or two about PHP, Ruby, MySQL, CSS/XHTML, product management, marketing, UX and UI design. I most closely identify with being a front-end developer and amateur designer.
For a detailed list of all the computers I use, gadgets I tote around, applications I use daily, services I pay for and more, check out the Stuff I Use page.
More
And I’m a rather large car nut. I currently drive a 2009 John Cooper Works edition MINI Cooper, used to drive a heavily modified 2002 Ford Mustang GT and have been in everything from a Ferrari F430 to a Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 and Audi R8.
