Thanks for stopping by — my name is Scott Matthews and this page is here to tell you a bit about me and my work. If you'd like to get in touch, I can be reached via .

Back in 1968, guitar amps were intentionally engineered to keep players from experimenting with distorted sounds. Electro-Harmonix changed all that. EHX products have since been used by everyone from Jimi Hendrix to Pink Floyd, The Police, REM, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Radiohead, White Stripes, etc. Electro-Harmonix is even featured in the mega-blockbuster video game Rock Band.

My goal for the new site (www.ehx.com) was to figure out new ways to involve the community. As Wired put it (see here): "what's shocking is that other companies haven't used a similar approach. By integrating clips of regular people using their products and adding a blog to pull in traffic, these same principles could strengthen the bottom lines of a wide variety of manufacturers."

When I first set out to design Andromeda, the idea was to make it easy to play music over the Web. A few years later, with PHP and ASP versions for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X, I'm happy to report that people seem to like it.

Andromeda customers now include organizations such as Greenpeace, Creative Artists Agency, US Air Force, Clear Channel, Salvation Army, as well as loads of independent musicians, voice-over artists, sermonists, and countless regular music fans.

The original idea was that Bitty Browser would be an easy way to integrate Andromeda within other Web sites. But the more I worked on it, I came to realize that this idea of "Picture-in-Picture for the Web" would equally apply to many other kinds of content

Bitty can now browse Web sites, RSS feeds, podcasts, OPML files, as well as content from services like YouTube, Google, Yahoo, eBay, Flickr, del.icio.us, Digg, etc. Additionally, Bitty is now integrated and available through Google, Microsoft Live.com, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Protopage, WebWag, TypePad, WordPress, 30 Boxes, YouOS, EyeOS, Widgetbox, etc.

I was invited to present Bitty at the fancy-schmancy PC Forum and Supernova technology conferences. Most recently, I launched a "white labeled" version of Bitty for use by CMP (publisher of TechWeb and InformationWeek), which is currently serving an advertising campaign for Microsoft.

I was awarded USPTO patent 7,284,208 for my work on Bitty Browser.

My work on Andromeda also lead to active participation in discussions about file sharing and intellectual property.

I wrote an article for Salon.com which was published along with a response by the EFF. I coded Baudio (code-named "Ka-Blamo") a 'concept app' that was covered by Slashdot and LawMeme. I engaged in some friendly sparring with Stanford Law Professor and "Free Culture" leader Larry Lessig. I enjoyed a few appearances on the nationally syndicated David Lawrence Show, and sat on a CMJ Music Marathon panel. My most recent contribution is DRUMS, a rough sketch for a P2P panacea.

I had the good luck to grow up in a musical home. My father, Mike Matthews, founded and still runs Electro-Harmonix, home of cult-classic guitar effects like the Big Muff Pi and Small Stone — as used by Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Beck, U2, Madonna, Gnarls Barkley, White Stripes, Wilco, and so on. He's also the leading manufacturer of vacuum tubes, used in amps made by Fender, Marshall, Mesa Boogie, McIntosh, Conrad-Johnson, etc.

So music came first, but my father also gave me my first personal computer, an Atari 800, back in 1981. I still have (and treasure) my Atari BASIC cartridge.

I graduated from Cornell with Computer Science in 1992, and joined a small communications firm making "interactive multimedia" kiosks and digital video for clients like Pfizer and Prudential. I was turned on to the Web on August 3, 1994 (thanks to Google I actually know the date — it was the same day as Lollapalooza in Providence, RI, right after MacWorld Boston) but my boss wasn't interested, so I set out on my own.

As a self-employed Web-wonk in the mid 1990's, I coded pages for Netscape, Time, and General Electric. Another project, fashion photo archive Firstview, drew international media attention (New York Times, People, Time, Le Monde). I also served as Director of Technology for Gen Art, a national nonprofit that promotes young artists, fashion designers and filmmakers.

In 1995 the MIT Media Lab awarded first place (in what was then the first interactive juried art show) to my digital graffiti project, Curator, which was exhibited in art galleries in Soho, NYC. The prize was a digital camera, and I celebrated by making this tour of Soho. Curator also helped launch a new line of Cannon printers.

In 1997 I developed Incubator, a turnkey database-driven e-commerce engine that still powers online catalogs. I started work on Andromeda in 1999, and Bitty Browser in 2004.

Andromeda is the android name of my partner in life, Amy Harmon. Amy is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist for the New York Times: most recently for her series on the cultural impact of new gentetic technologies (here's the award), and previously as a member of the "How Race is Lived in America" series team (here's her contribution).

I've cameoed in a few of Amy's travel stories — here's one about digital cameras and another about our trip to Tucson, where we stayed overnight at Kitt Peak National Observatory and took this picture of NGC 1042.

On August 24, 2004 we welcomed our first little Andromite, Sasha Harmon Matthews, to the family. Bitty Browser is named in her honor. We all live happily ever after in New York City.