Quixotic Bravado by Josh Babetski

About the Author (aka Josh, aka quixado, aka Me)

If you haven’t figured it out already, I’m Josh Babetski. You can generally find me online using the handle “quixado™,” which is a shortening of QUIXotic BravADO™, the name of this site and my state of mind at times.

I founded my first company, TaxiCafe Media™, in 1998 as a web development shop. As a freelance web developer, I became intrigued by the power of online communities and how it could connect very different people and interests together. It evolved into a mission to help make those connections in a fun way, building a more social web before the term “social networking” rocketed up the buzzword charts. This led to a co-founding a project launched in 2002 called CollectiveDetective.org, the first site with custom-made collaboration tools for online puzzles and mysteries and puzzles as part of viral immersive entertainment and marketing campaigns. CD.org ran until 2005.

In 2005, I co-founded Culture Captioning, an organization which specializes in marketing via word of mouth, viral communications, and blogging, applying the lessons of CD.org to a new format.

I now run Collective Detective®, a micro start-up developing social and engaging entertainment projects and creative gaming experiences. Our name of course is a nod to our first social endeavor. We’re currently busy working on Collectivus™, a new project you can learn more about on the Collective Detective Blog.

I also lead a dual-life as the Evangelist and Community Manager for MapQuest, Inc. I am primarily responsible for outreach and engagement of developers and promotion of the MapQuest Platform and LocalQuest Program. I collaborate with Marketing on external and internal communication and messaging and specialize in competitive and trend analysis.

Yet another role I play at MapQuest is as one-half of the Product Management team which created and designed MapQuest Local. The site provides a dashboard of local content and creates an opportunity for companies to provide users localized content and leverage MapQuest’s 48+ million monthly unique users to build their audience. When not doing that, I also Product Manage widgets, third-party integrations and the MapQuest Developer Network. Previously, I oversaw client-side development on MapQuest.com and wrote a lot of code — sometimes I still do.

Yeah, I keep pretty busy.

When not speaking at conferences or developing the “next big thing” for CD, I try to travel, read, keep up on popular culture, mountain bike, blow stuff up on my Xbox 360 and play some Rock Band 2 on my PS3.

I live in the cow country of Central Pennsylvania with my lovely girlfriend Traci and her stupid dog.

Colophon

Development Tools

• TextMate
• Adobe Fireworks
• Some of the icons used on this site come from the Silk icon set at FamFamFam.com

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• WordPress
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• Feeds by FeedBurner

This site is entirely hand-coded and reasonable attempts have been made to ensure that the XHTML and CSS validate.

Legal Mumbo Jumbo

Trademark

Quixotic Bravado™ and Quixado™ are trademarks of Josh Babetski (that’s me).