My bio

In 1977, Peter Svensk played a predecessor of Netrek on a mainframe terminal at UC Berkeley while attending tenth-grade Summer Leadership Academy. In that same year, he produced his first new media presentation, a photographic multi-image tour of the Mother Lode town of Columbia, California. Shot on his first camera, a Nikon F2AS Photomic, the photographs belong to the first of hundreds of presentations he would later produce.

During high school, Peter was an “engineer” at the Calico Mine Ride at Knott’s Berry Farm, delivering the eight-minute spiel thousands of times. The Mine Ride won the 1998 Themed Entertainment Award for Classic Attraction by the Themed Entertainment Association. Peter still says it’s the best job he’s ever had.

In the early ’80s, Peter started using three computers: the original IBM PC, running MS-DOS, the KayPro II running CP/M, and the ClearLight MicroStar, a multi-image computer for producing multimedia shows. In 1984, he was among the first to buy a Macintosh computer. Soon thereafter he received a beta copy of an application called Aldus PageMaker, and for him, and the rest of the world, publishing was forever changed.

Ten years later, Peter would work for Aldus Corporation and become a top technical evangelist for that category-defining desktop publishing product.

After co-founding Electric Art in the early 1980s, he pioneered using the Macintosh for videographic design, previsualization, and video editing. He supervised the postproduction of dozens of corporate videos using the world’s first digital video tools, Quantel PaintBox and Harry.

Peter spent several years in the print production side of digital imaging, working as a senior technologist for TRW Space & Defense (NYSE: TRW), then as a young technical director for Applied Graphics Technologies (NASDAQ: AGTX), then one of the largest prepress firms in the world.

Moving into technology sales in 1992, Peter joined Aldus Corporation as graphics consultant, working with the print design community on issues like color reproduction, electronic page design, and digital prepress production tools.

When Adobe Systems Incorporated (NASDAQ: ADBE) acquired Aldus in 1994, Peter became an applications engineer, and acted as a liaison between Adobe and the graphic design, print production, and internet publishing communities. During his five years at Adobe, Peter became a respected resource for the company and its customers.

He learned that the only way to earn revenue in software, quarter after quarter, is to build best-of-class products that people want to use, and charge them for it. Period. No fancy web business models, just plain business sense.

In 1997, Peter left Adobe to join Netbot, Inc., an internet startup in Seattle, Washington as business development manager, and later product manager.

Founded in 1996, Netbot pioneered technologies that let users specify what they want, and then obtain and interact with the right information from multiple websites. Jango, an online shopping assistant, was the first example of this technology working for customers, and was acquired by Excite Inc., in November 1997.

In May 1999, the @Home Network and Excite merged to create Excite@Home. The company’s properties, Excite, @Home, and @Work, offered consumers content and interactive services across both narrowband and broadband, and advertisers highly targeted marketing solutions.

Peter was retail product manager and produced merchandising products and services in the Excite@Home commerce group.

In January 2000, Peter moved to take on another internet startup, Punch Networks, first as director of strategic partnerships, then as director of product management.

Punch WebGroups lets people store, share and automatically update their files using web and wireless services.

For the next couple of years, Peter produced a number of digital marketing projects including a sales awareness campaign for Microsoft and its international partner Getronics, distributed to more than 5000 field sales reps.

For more than six years at Microsoft, Peter was a digital marketer who produced and managed several websites on Microsoft.com, including the Citizen Service Platform, Citizen Safety Architecture, and the Higher Education professional development portal (which featured an explainer video he produced).

After Microsoft, Peter offered a wide range of services to create content that cut through a noisy marketplace. He connected products, services, and ideas with digital form factors which are more accessible to audiences, and easier on budgets.

In 2016, Peter edited the award-winning student film, Jericho Jones, by Cole Brewer, and Peter’s son, Andrew, assisted as colorist. (Warning, mature content.)

Today, Peter is senior marketing manager for Kardin Systems, a leading provider of advanced commercial real estate budgeting solutions.