I found out today that the principle author of a popular Javascript/AJAX library Mochikit is my former highschool classmate Bob Ippolito. I remember him being pretty smart. I supposed he would make a name for himself in some CS circles and it looks like he has. He is also apparently a co-founder of Mochi Media, a company that makes products for content creators. Mochibot can be used to track usage of Adobe Flash content. It looks like they are moving into some advertising space by creating an advertising system for casual online games.

Interesting that Bob has moved into this area. Mochikit looks like it’s had some extensive work done on it in the past few years so it looks like it’s matured well but I imagined a bit more technical, low level path like kernel or low level API development for Bob rather than the relatively high level application/library development in javascript/web applications. I guess everyone follows the buck in the end to some extent and the money is in web dev.