Ralf Schwoebel

Ralf is founder and CEO of Tradebit AG and the US daughter company Tradebit Inc. He created serveral e-business solutions in Germany and the US in the last 13 years and works with Linux since 1996. He personally supports Open Source solutions with time and money since the late 90's, is a search engine specialist and likes PHP, Perl and the bash.

Ralf Schwoebel got into e-commerce, when he opened the first internet shopping mall in Germany in 1995 at the age of 22. His background as a game developer and book author on the Commodore AMIGA helped him to thrive in the new internet era.

In 1997 he was founder and from 1997 to 2000 on the management board of the Open Source e-commerce company intraDAT, creating and distributing a high-class shopping solution in cooperation with SuSE.

From 2000 to 2002 he was CEO of intraDAT International, Inc. - based in Reston, VA. where he held serveral presentations about Open Source developments and e-commerce projects on Linux.

He is still an active member of the Linux community and sponsors personally serveral Open Source projects.

In 2002 he started an Internet marketing and "search engine optimization" company, which he led to a with a few million dollars revenue before he sold the company late 2004.

In 2005 he wrote the concept for an Open Source graphical deployment framework for PHP-GTK programs (called Gnope) and sponsored the development (www.gnope.org). Gnope was recieved with great acceptance by the PHP community.

In 2007, the german financial magazin "Wirtschaftswoche" called him "one of the 50 most interesting entrepreneurs" in Germany.

As the owner and CEO of Tradebit, Inc. he is responsible for the development of the platform on www.tradebit.com and wrote most of the code himself in PHP from scratch.

He is married and an active blogger.