John Brennan

Bio

John is interested in the intersection of technology and philanthropy. He is interested in connecting communities around similar topics to do more together.

Before OpenAction, John worked at Microsoft and the DoD where he became a data junkie getting into the worlds of open data, semantic web, and RDF. Growing up, he got his first taste of computational power after he built one of the first music artist communities in 1998 (at 17) that he sold to buy his first car.

Projects

BuzzTable
BuzzTable puts the "old school" table buzzer on your phone - establishing a direct line of communication between the restaurant and their customer.
Other apps focus on restaurant discovery, but we're all about retention - incentivizing customers to return through loyalty rewards, deals, and a more personal relationship.

OpenAction
A technology platform that connects the silo of information living on many nonprofit websites. Philanthropic organizations, like Acumen Fund, use our widget to showcase their impact, and we aggregate all those projects together (over 15,000 of them) to get a more complete representation of resource allocation. The project has been viewed in over 163 countries to date.

Mobile Attendee App (Social Media Week, 2011)
John was contacted by Social Media Week, an event that takes place in Feb and Sept every year to bring over 100,000 people together in 20 cities. They wanted to use OpenAction to connect their communities of people, but we wanted to take it a step further. We built a mobile app, and leveraged public profile information, to provide attendees with a way to find the “needles” in the proverbial haystack at the event. It was a big hit.

Social Action Map (Mar ‘09)
People are volunteering all over the world. This application leverages opportunities to make a difference from over 50 online platforms. Data is curated using complex pattern matching and entity extracting techniques, and displayed to the user in near real-time. Project was picked up by The Huffington Post and Mashable.

Menuocity.com (‘03-’06)
A restaurant portal where students can order food online. I built this in college and started by targeting students at the University of Maryland. Once the company got some traction around campus, and through the local newspapers, we were able to sign deals with the local restaurants to provide this service for a small monthly fee. In less than 3 months Menuocity was placing over 100 orders per day! We tried to expand to New Jersey, where we were from, but didn’t understand the local market, spread ourselves too thin, and ultimately retired the business once we graduated.

Awards

Speaking

Press

Residence

Breadcrumb trail