Trevor Cornwell

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Trevor Cornwell is an American businessman and entrepreneur. He has developed several media and tech businesses and made innovative use of online technologies. [1]

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In 2016, he co-founded the company Votecastr to track the 2016 presidential election in real time. The company published the results of turnout tracking at poll locations online throughout the day. However, the platform experienced numerous difficulties during its inception and ultimately proved inaccurate in its execution. Most predictions made by Votecastr fell short of reality. [2]

Votecastr is a private company, founded in 2016, to track, model, and publish real-time election results from the 2016 Presidential Election, on November 8, 2016.

Early life and education

Cornwell was born in New York City and grew up in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where he attended Hastings High School. From 1982 to 1987 he attended the Johns Hopkins University, where he received a B.A. in Russian. [1]

New York City Largest city in the United States

The City of New York, usually called either New York City (NYC) or simply New York (NY), is the most populous city in the United States and thus also in the state of New York. With an estimated 2017 population of 8,622,698 distributed over a land area of about 302.6 square miles (784 km2), New York is also the most densely populated major city in the United States. Located at the southern tip of the state of New York, the city is the center of the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the world by urban landmass and one of the world's most populous megacities, with an estimated 20,320,876 people in its 2017 Metropolitan Statistical Area and 23,876,155 residents in its Combined Statistical Area. A global power city, New York City has been described as the cultural, financial, and media capital of the world, and exerts a significant impact upon commerce, entertainment, research, technology, education, politics, tourism, art, fashion, and sports. The city's fast pace has inspired the term New York minute. Home to the headquarters of the United Nations, New York is an important center for international diplomacy.

Hastings-on-Hudson, New York Village in New York, United States

Hastings-on-Hudson is a village and inner suburb of New York City located in the southwest part of the town of Greenburgh in the state of New York, United States. It is located on the eastern bank of the Hudson River, about 20 miles (32 km) north of midtown Manhattan in New York City, and is served by a stop on the Metro-North Hudson Line. To the north of Hastings-on-Hudson is the village of Dobbs Ferry, to the south the city of Yonkers, and to the east unincorporated parts of Greenburgh. As of the 2010 census, it had a population of 7,849. It lies on U.S. Route 9, "Broadway" in Hastings-on-Hudson.

Johns Hopkins University Private research university in Baltimore, Maryland

The Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named for its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur, abolitionist, and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest —of which half financed the establishment of Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution's first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. Adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany's ancient Heidelberg University, Johns Hopkins University is considered the first research university in the United States. Over the course of several decades, the university has led all U.S. universities in annual research and development expenditures. In fiscal year 2016, Johns Hopkins spent nearly $2.5 billion on research.

Career

Early career

Cornwell worked as a scheduler for Gary Hart's presidential campaign in 1982-84. He founded the non-profit National Service League, which sought to aid the transition to democracy in Eastern Europe, and ran it from 1990 to 1994. He also founded Central Europe Today, a radio news program broadcast from Budapest, and ran it from 1994 to 1996 [1] during which time he lived in Budapest. [3] He worked in sales and development at America's Promise in 1996-97. [3] At America’s Promise, founded by Colin Powell, Cornwell made $5,000 a month. [3]

Budapest Capital city in Hungary

Budapest is the capital and the most populous city of Hungary, and the tenth-largest city in the European Union by population within city limits. The city had an estimated population of 1,752,704 in 2016 distributed over a land area of about 525 square kilometres. Budapest is both a city and county, and forms the centre of the Budapest metropolitan area, which has an area of 7,626 square kilometres and a population of 3,303,786, comprising 33 percent of the population of Hungary.

Colin Powell Former U.S. Secretary of State and retired four-star general

Colin Luther Powell is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. During his military career, Powell also served as National Security Advisor (1987–1989), as Commander of the U.S. Army Forces Command (1989) and as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (1989–1993), holding the latter position during the Persian Gulf War. Powell was the first, and so far the only, Jamaican American to serve on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under U.S. President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005, the first black person to serve in that position.

Skyjet

In 1997 Cornwell founded Skyjet, a reservation system for business jets, and served as its president until 2002. [1] The idea for Skyjet came to him while bicycling eight miles to work in Washington, D.C., while he was employed at America's Promise. On that daily bicycle ride, he passed Reagan National Airport, where there were plenty of private planes sitting unused. “And it started to occur to me that there was probably a more efficient way to be able to use those planes rather than just having them sit on the ground for days at a time.” [3]

From 2002-4, Cornwell was vice president for strategy and business development of Business Jet Solutions, Bombardier Aerospace, [1] which purchased Skyjet from him for five million dollars. [3] Skyjet is now owned by Directional Aviation. [4]

Andrew Warner of Mixergy has described Cornwell as “a guy who could barely afford the price of a FedEx envelope to ship out his business plan to investors” but who managed nonetheless to build “a hit charter jet company”, namely Skyjet. [3]

Broadband

Cornwell founded Broadband Television Network in 2005, and was its president until 2007.

appbackr.inc

In December 2009, Cornwell founded appbackr.inc, a wholesale market exchange for apps. [1] According to its website, “appbackr’s mission is to index the world’s apps, enabling app users to make informed and inspired decisions, and making apps accessible to everyone through the App Anatomy™ Project.” [5] He is still CEO of that Palo Alto-based firm, which helps publishers and platforms identify the right apps to optimize revenue. appbackr won the PayPal X Developer Challenge; it is an OnMobile 100 Company and an AlwaysOn 250 Company. [6] [7]

Other professional activities

Cornwell was deputy political director of the U.S. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee under the chairmanship of John F. Kerry . He has also been a leading figure in several U.S. political campaigns. [1]

Comment about entrepreneurship

Asked by Crains to recount a business mistake he had made and learned from, Cornwell recalled his founding of Central Europe Today “right after the Berlin Wall came down,” when “phone lines from Budapest to London were routed through somewhere else.” The problem was that the broadcast was routed through different European cities on different days, with no rhyme or reason, “so we had to be there every step of the way to wake up the operator in whatever country – but that was difficult because we never knew beforehand what country it would be....We had all the big things right, but this small little detail at the core of what we were doing was broken and so everything else broke as a result.” He learned from this experience that “you have to own, obsess and be paranoid about every single step.” [8]

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References

  1. Corasaniti, Nick (September 10, 2016). "Real-Time Election Day Projections May Upend News Tradition". The New York Times. ISSN   0362-4331 . Retrieved October 16, 2016.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 "We found the lost Mixergy interview!". Mixergy.
  3. "Private Jet Charter - Private Aviation - Skyjet". Skyjet.
  4. "About Us".
  5. "Trevor Cornwell on filling stores' wholesale gap with appbackr's AdSense meets eBay app financing platform".
  6. "Carpe Diem: Now is the time for devs to take on Tizen, says appbackr's Trevor Cornwell".
  7. "Trevor Cornwell". Crain's Silicon Valley.