Jud Valeski joins hobbyDB Board of Directors

Jud Valeski is joining the hobbyDB Board of Directors. His role and his expertise are a bit different than our usual team members however. Jud isn’t a collector in the traditional sense, but his hobby is understanding data and figuring out organic, human connections that go along with solid, computerized information.

“I’m intrigued by the granularity and amount of data on hobbyDB, after all they are working on documenting billions of collectibles,” he said. He joined the Board particularly because he was interested in data taxonomy, which brings him back to his days when he worked for GNIP, a Boulder-based provider of social data that is one of the largest data processing businesses taking in all data from various social media sites and later became part of Twitter.

What that all means in a nutshell is, somewhere in all the numbers and names and images in hobbyDB’s database there are patterns and relationships that the team might never have dreamed of as it refined and improved the website. It’s about naming things and making decisions about how to map different concepts and terms to a consistent structure.

Before co-founding GNIP, he had been a part of the engineering and product teams at AOL, IBM, Microsoft, Netscape and Onebox. Tens of millions of people have used the products and services he helped pioneer. Christian Braun, hobbyDB’s CEO says “I am looking forward to working with Jud and believe that his experience and expertise will make hobbyDB an even more powerful tool for collectors”.