Lou Kaczmarek

I was born in Toronto in 1964 and grew up a 10 minute walk from Nathan Phillips Square. I like to make things and systems of things. Because my father was a cabinet maker, design and aesthetics are very important to me.

On the way to getting my Bachelor of Engineering at McGill University (where I met my life partner), I would summer back in Toronto and work for Cantel, one of the first mobile wireless network operators - mostly field measurements but I also wrote some down-tilt signal strength prediction and traffic simulation software. This was really cool and a few years after graduation I was planning mobile infrastructure for whole provinces. Some evenings I would attend meetings at the McLuhan Centre for Culture and Technology (at UofT). I began to understand media and the importance of hypertext. Data to mobile devices was certainly on our minds then but the social impacts of just having a voice phone in your pocket laid the groundwork; texting was not yet a thing here like it was in Europe. I got to meet and work with Eric McLuhan, Barry Nevitt, Francesco Guardiani, Derrick de Kerckhove and gave a few lectures on mobile technology at the Centre and at Ryerson University.

After that, I took some time abroad to study french civilization at the Sorbonne and started photographing Paris at night. Suddenly, photography was my new calling and in between consulting projects I began studying in earnest and apprenticing under Brian Smale, Chris Buck, Ron Baxter Smith along with many other fine photographers who generously shared their time and knowledge. The world of tech called me back full-time and I joined a maker of wireless base stations (Tellabs Wireless, Burlington MA) which took me all over the world and taught me the infrastructure business. After seeing a fascinating talk regarding wireless trends at a CTIA show by Arthur D. Little (ADL), I joined ADL and began working alongside some amazingly smart folks - it was technology strategy mostly, often supported by financial scenario analysis. Cincinnati Bell Wireless and then Verizon Labs were my next stops, to help evolve their systems and product line strategies. But since mobile wireless back-end systems were becoming router/server-based, data-centers were merging, and large system integrators seemed to be disappearing, I decided to refocus on enterprise technologies, architecture and the business of information security, in '05.