A little bit about me and how I got into OLEDs

It seems that a lot of people (more than one, honest) want to know more about me, and how I got interested in OLEDs. It seems like a very strange turn of events for me too, but that's how life goes.

So my name is Ron Mertens, 38 years old from Herzelia, Israel (near Tel-Aviv), where I live with my two beautiful daughters. I'm a software engineer by trade, and from 1998 to 2005 I worked for three different companies (coding and designing software modems, compilers and ad delivery networks).

I first heard about OLEDs back in 1998 or so (in a BeOS online forum of all places). There was a discussion about invisible tanks, the idea being to cover the tank with flexible displays and, by using a video camera, showing the image behind the tank. Someone mentioned OLEDs and it was so interesting I ended up buying a few UDC shares.

I kept reading OLED news and in 2004 I launched OLED-Info (which was called OL-ED.com at first). This was a hobby (and an AdSense experiment) at first, just an aggregation of OLED news. The first readers were investors from Yahoo's financial board. The site readership kept growing and by 2007 it became the web's leading OLED site (not much competition back then to be honest) where many consumers and industry professional visited to get OLED news and resources.

So I decided to quit my day job and devote most of my time to my internet and software projects. I opened several other sites (on Graphene, MRAM, Spintronics and more) although OLED-Info was always my main project. In May 2011 I released The OLED Handbook, which has been been bought and read (and hopefully enjoyed) by hundreds of professionals.

OLED-Info is growing all the time as more and more people hear about OLEDs and want to know more. Today the site is being visited by over 100,000 people in a month, I have over 12,000 subscribers to the newsletter and almost 2,000 Facebook fans. I hope that this growth will continue and I do my best to evangelize OLEDs and help the industry wherever I can.

Besides OLEDs, I like hiking, ski (not something you do everyday in sunny Israel), books and photography. I also love music. I started playing piano when I was about 13, and about four months ago I started learning how to play the guitar, too. I like to improvise and compose, and back in 2000 I even released a mostly-instrumental album. I still improvise a lot, here's something from last month (you can hear my two daughters chatting in the background):

So that's me. Thanks for reading.