About me

Posted on by 8 comments

Kaveh Bazargan

I am a director of River Valley Technologies, which I manage jointly with my business partner and dear friend, Radhakrishnan, whom I met in 1996.

I am Iranian, but I live in Exeter, UK. (Update Nov 2009: I now live in London!) I travel a lot, mostly to our offices in Trivandrum, India, but also to conferences in Europe and US, and to Iran.

My education

I studied at Imperial College, London (Optics section of Physics dept). I ended my research with a PhD in Display Holography. I still hold a strong interest in the field, hence my website, The Holographer.

Why Blog?

I think my friends would rightly call me a big-mouth! I feel I often give people a headache by passionately airing my views, and they are too polite to complain. My hope is by writing my thoughts down, I might calm down a bit, knowing friends and colleagues can read up on my thoughts if they have a vague interest.

For years I have had the urge to be a “blogger”, but I lacked the courage. It’s easier to blend with the silent majority. But now I feel the time has come.

My Company

I started my company (originally called Focal Image Ltd) exactly 20 years ago, in the dawn of the desktop publishing revolution. I started by creating simple graphics for technical books (Using Adobe Illustrator version 1.1 :-) ). Soon after, I went into typesetting mathematical journals and books, using the amazing software called TeX, which I had used to write my PhD. (I was the first TeX user in Imperial College!)

In 1996 I travelled to India and met with several companies who were interested in having a partnership with Focal Image. I ended up becoming a partner with the smallest of the lot, River Valley Technologies in Kerala, a decision that changed my life. TeX remains at the core of our work and will for the foreseeable future.

We are proud of what we have achieved in our company with the help of our staff, who are more like our family. We are blessed with a beautiful environment, away from the corporate IT world. We value the traditional simple life in Kerala, combined with our work which we think is the best anywhere.

Children in Cochin, Kerala

September 2008, Trivandrum, India

8 comments on “About me”

  1. Hello Kaveh, Myself Anjima, For an assignment, i was asked to do a research about desktop publishing companies and in the discussion River Valley Technologies came and just for curiosity gone through your site and blog and which is really interesting. I liked the way you take care of the employees and the people around you. From now on i will be a visitor to your blog, hope you don't mind, will keep you posted...:-) All the best! Regards Anjima
    Reply
  2. Thank you for your comments, Anjima. Hope you enjoy our site. :-)
    Reply
  3. Dear Kaveh, I was visiting the website and the blog like mentioned for my assignment based on Corporate Social REsponsibilty.. TRied accessing your previous homepage, however to my dismay since the photos are not available.. kindly let me know if there is any other link for the same... I ;ike the comment particlualry on no Spoons and forks used so less water is consumed...
    Reply
  4. Thanks for bringing it to my attention Anand. Previous site should have photos but seem to have disappeared. It was done using Apple's former web system.
    Reply
  5. I just wanted to say thank you. For all you kind and lovely work your share with us. I browse quite a lot and your iniciative is one of the best of its kind. Thank you very much. By the way I am also interested in video and documenting. I just started ordering our videos at http://www.medialab-prado.es using http://www.w3.org/TR/mediaont-10/ I would end up with an RDF of around 600 entries. Not much but not bad :) It could be a good idea to do the same with yours, and put them together as we also deal with stuff related with free software. Saludos
    Reply
  6. Gabriel, sorry for very late approval of your comment. I knew it was in inbox, but just couldn't find it!! Thanks for your compliments. You have high quality stuff and I like using open standards. Let's discuss it.
    Reply
  7. Sure Kaveh, No prob for the delay. By no I have around 760 flv videos (and always growing). I'm coding them to webm amd later i would try to extract just audio. At the same time I have an spreasshet with some descriptive fields ( dublin core properties). I am trying to parse those to an RDF following the core properties explained in the W3C standar Media Resource Ontology. Especially interesting point 5.1 core properties. How do you have organized yours?
    Reply
  8. Hi Kaveh, I really admire the journey you have taken with your work. I worked for Canon for several years and found the big corporate life not fully agreeable so I now have my own activities and business down near Exeter! Just where you have been based for a while. Fabian
    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>