Born in San Francisco, Rob Bearman grew up on the mean streets of the San Francisco Peninsula. Haunting the infield of Cuernavaca Park, Rob gave up a professional career in baseball after discovering the joys of the San Mateo Union High School District's mainframe computer, with which he interfaced via programs punched on thin paper tape. It was love at first sight. Discouraged by his senior year composition teacher from ever attempting the written word again, Rob hustled off to the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied physics and astronomy, earning a degree in the latter.

At Berkeley, Rob continued his romance with computers, purchasing a Commodore 64 and a 13-inch portable color television (which he still owns today) as a monitor. The folks at the Lawrence Hall of Science somehow learned of Rob's possession of said Commodore 64 and promptly hired him to port educational software to it from Apple II sources. Rob also spent time at college writing FORTRAN programs for the Berkeley Supernova Search Group, including such fascinating work as constructing digital imagery of the sky using dot-matrix character printers.

After a brief fling with teaching high school math and physics (with a Master's degree in Education earned at Stanford University), Rob joined up with IBM as an evaluator of educational software and a test engineer for network environments. He next joined Software Publishing Corporation during the great software startup years in Silicon Valley, first as a software test engineer, and later as a software development engineer.

In 1991, Rob moved from the Silicon Valley to Redmond, Washington where he joined Microsoft. Rob worked on the Windows NT 4.0 team, otherwise known as Cairo, and helped define the user interface later introduced by Windows 95. Rob's early work on the tray, task manager and desktop made its way into Windows 95, 98, and Windows XP. Rob also led the development team that pioneered the user interface later marketed as Windows XP Media Center Edition.

Rob left Microsoft in 1999 to join up with Edward Jung, Nathan Myhrvold, Mark Malamud, and others in founding Open Design, a company building network-based application integration tools. Rob built and led a team of ten engineers, along with serving as a key architect.

Rob now runs Hyperfine Software as his outlet for development creativity. He is particularly interested in web applications and web services, making use of the Microsoft .NET framework and SQL Server. The plays-with-matches.com game site is a collaboration with his friend, Mark Malamud. The two of them have also built networked realtime location tracking systems.

In Spring 2006, Rob was the architectural mind behind Jott Networks, the Seattle-based service that converts phone call reminders to text. Rob designed the original product code base, including the entire back end database engine, web service interfaces, and the phone-facing vocal user interface. Rob's work was instrumental in Jott Networks raising capital from Ackerley Partners, Draper Richards, and Niklas Zennstrom.

In late 2006, Rob started YouMob with his high school friend and former Microsoft manager, Steve Falcon.

Continuing his association with Jott Networks, Rob developed several projects including rearchitecting and engineering a major redesign of Jott's web site, hiring and training new Jott engineers, and contributing in general to Jott's intellectual property. In Summer 2009, Jott Networks was acquired by Nuance Communications where Rob now serves as Software Architect.

Rob resides in the Seattle area, maintaining his business at his home office with more computers than he's told he needs. He despises those who speak of themselves in the third person.