Featured Author Biography: Wes Kussmaul
Wes Kussmaul is the author of several books about privacy and authentication, including Quiet Enjoyment (2004), Own Your Privacy (2007) (also published as The Sex Life of Tables), and The Future Needs You (2007). As CEO of the Village Group, Inc., Wes is involved in deploying a PKI called the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure. QEI is distinguished by a focus on key pairs established through standardized enrollment practices and online spaces built upon the very old concepts of professional licensing, building codes and occupancy permits.
In 1971, Wes received a BS in physics from Central Missouri State University while stationed at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base (Strategic Air Command). After graduating, he began his career managing database development projects at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company. From there he moved into the computer graphics industry, in technical support, sales, and then sales management for Gould Incorporated, Benson SA, and Tektronix, Inc. His territory included the Cambridge, Massachusetts research and development community, which brought him in contact with the early Internet pioneers.
In 1981 Wes founded Delphi Internet Services Corporation and its Delphi online service, home of the Kussmaul Encyclopedia, the world's first computerized encyclopedia and an early example of a hypertext concepts. When the Internet was opened to commercial traffic in 1989, Delphi became the first international online service to transform itself into an Internet service provider and the first to market Internet access to mass audiences.
Delphi was sold to Rupurt Murdoch’s News Corporation in 1993.
In 1986 Wes launched a Delphi spinoff company, Global Villages, Inc. to provide magazine publishers with business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management, and promotion services to allow them to offer online services under the magazine's own name to their subscribers and advertisers. But Wes realized that the unboundedness of the Web posed obstacles to the kind of secure communities that publishers needed. In 1998, in order to focus on the authenticity issue that is so important to reliable online communities, he sold the hosting portion of Global to a partnership that has become part of Verio NTT.
The continuing operation turned its attention to enrollment technologies that would establish reliable identities that would enable reliable online spaces governed by the principles of professional licensing, building codes and occupancy permits. His work caught the attention of the team at the International Telecommunication Union that was building the World e-Trust Initiative, a PKI providing an authenticated e-commerce infrastructure to developing nations. Motivated by the fact that the developed world needs precisely the same thing, in 2002 the company became a charter signatory to the World e-Trust MoU and is now a Sector Member of the ITU.
To accommodate the fact that a reliable information infrastructure calls for both duly constituted public authority as well as private entrepreneurial initiative, Wes reorganized the company in 2005 as The Village Group, Inc., a provider of intellectual property and support services to entrepreneurs, enrollment officers and organizations involved in the development of online authenticity using the methods, principles and standards specified in the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.
Today Wes is an individual adherent of the International Union of Latin Notaries and has been appointed a Notary Ambassador by the National Notary Association. Wes serves in an advisory capacity to the newly elected Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union, located in Geneva, Switzerland.
Wes currenty lives with his family in Weston, Massachusetts.