The team

TechHaze is a technology blog run by students from Europe, the U.S. and Asia. For aditional information, send an email at info@techhaze.com

Florian Wardell is the founder and editor of TechHaze. Born in Austria, but half British and half French, he always had a taste for long trips and unknown destinations. At the age of 13, he was fortunate enough to skip a whole year of school and to travel all around Asia. He has visited places like Tibet, Pakistan and Myanmar and lived in Italy, France, Austria and Cambodia, where he met Raimondo and Calixte Pictet, Red Lebrun and Timothee Salze Lozac’h who are now part of the TechHaze team.
Now, Florian studies at the Insitut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris. During his free time, he writes for TechHaze, roams the internet, designs websites and takes pictures. He used to be a hardcore PC user, but a year ago, light shone upon him: he switched to Mac after giving a shot at Linux. You can visit his personal photography website or contact him at florianwardell@techhaze.com

Mariano Calixte Pictet was born in a barbaric land in Western Europe but grew up in Africa and Asia. He had to leave civilisation less than a year ago for his studies, and is still regretting it (appart for his bandwidth, he loves that). He’s a constantly irritated fan of falling-edge technology because using an application for more than a month is boring. He’s ideologically pro-freedom (i.e. open-source) but likes to consider himself open-minded as he does not always believe in the viability of an open model. He’s also pro- everything that’s supposed to be ideologically cool (love, anarchism, democracy, ecology, open source, pink elephants, and people rubbing his back). He uses mainly open-source software because he’s a cheapskate and because he’s lazy (package managers are his gods) but he gets frustrated from time to time and secretly daydreams of switching to Mac. Calixte has used several Operating Systems as he grew up (Windows 95, 98, ME, XP, Vista, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Ubuntu Linux and others) and owns a 10″ Asus EeePC netbook and an old Power Macintosh G3 (the netbook is faster). He hates any interface that exists by principle, loves configuring them to his needs and tastes and firmly believes that the less they are configurable, the better. Calixte is the contributing editor of TechHaze, you can drop him a line at calixtepictet@techhaze.com

Native of Seoul, South Korea, Steve Kim has lived in New York for 10 years and graduated from Phillips Andover. He founded his first business at age 16 and created two new Internet ventures upon graduation. He is interested mostly in RIA, Adobe Flex, and SaaS. Holder of several communication and UX-related patents, Steve is now concentrating his efforts to go into the field of intellectual property aggregation. He is currently an undergraduate student at the Insitut d’Etudes Politiques of Paris and wil cover the business section of TechHaze.com. Please feel free to write to him at stevekim@techhaze.com

French, Swiss and somewhat Italian, Raimondo Pictet lived in Burkina Faso and Cambodia for about twelve years, before moving to Switzerland to study mechanical engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne (EPFL). He’s passionate about machines that glide, machines that lazily hang around in total emptiness, and machines that do other cool and useless stuff. He loves playing drums. Raimondo has very strong opinions, and is always eager to have an intense debate on what makes space exploration essential to human survival or what defines quality in music. Raimondo will write about aeropace engineering and other really complicated things. Raimondo is the TechHaze team coordinator, you can contact him at raimondopictet@techhaze.com

Red Lebrun is an art/technology enthusiast. Fascinated by the thin line that separates technology from culture, he often seeks to challenge society’s pre-conception that technology belongs only in computers, though it has been shaping the way we live our lives for decades. Most often this is subtle, like cities being structured around roads, but he is always on the hunt for the next eccentric clash of the digital realm with our analog lives. Red currently lives in Singapore where he studies at the Lasalle College of Arts. Feel free to ask him questions at redlebrun@techhaze.com

Born in North Carolina, USA, Patrick Chen has lived in Paris and Boston, Massachusetts, before going back to France to study at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris. He is particularly interested in the design aspect of technology and more particularly on how art, aesthetics and design is integral to technology. Patrick has had the chance to travel extensively, mainly across South and Central America, which remains one of his passions, and hopes to travel more throughout Asia and Europe in the years to come. Feel free to contact him at patrickchen@techhaze.com.