Ron Martinez

Founder, Aerbook

Ron Martinez is the founder of aerbook, and its parent company, Invention Arts. He’s a prolific inventor, with close to a hundred and fifty issued patents or patent applications currently in flight.

Ron’s introduction to computers as an expressive medium was in the mid-80’s, when as an aspiring writer in New York, he got jobs writing YA adventure books, contributing to humor anthologies, writing comics for Heavy Metal and other publications. After a book packager asked him to adapt an Arthur C. Clarke novel, Rendezvous with Rama, to graphic adventure format, Ron learned to program and built an interactive fiction system. He went on to use that and its variations to write interactive Star Trek stories, original murder mysteries, political simulations, and other titles for publishers like Simon & Schuster, Spinnaker, Philips Interactive Media, Electronic Arts, and others. By the mid-90’s, he built 10Six, one of the first massively multiplayer games, published and operated by Sega. (Though built in the late 90’s, it continues to thrive as an indie game at ProjectVisitor.com. 10six introduced ownable, transactable virtual goods for the first time.

Prior to his current work at Invention Arts, Ron worked for a number of years as Vice President, Intellectual Property Innovation for Yahoo! There he designed and built the IP Innovation function which over a four year period delivered high volume targeted, patentable IP and productizable innovation. He also initiated Yahoo!’s content IP asset management and operations program, implementing a global, real-time rights infrastructure called Rights Engine.