About

Josh BabetskiHi! My name is Josh Babetski. This is my website.

You can also usually find me online using the handle/nickname/username of "quixado™," which is a shortening of QUIXotic BravADO™, the name of this site. You can find a list of the online communities I frequent most in the sidebar.

I'm the founder of Collective Detective™, where we develop social location gaming and entertainment applications. Our latest project: Collectivus™, is in limited testing.

My day job is the Director of Social and Local Products at Interactive One.

I live in New York City with my lovely fiancée Traci, our son, and two very odd cats. In addition to tech, I like traveling, music, soccer, designing our future house, and have an odd knack for pop culture trivia.

Puzzy from Collective Detective

Puzzy

I get asked this a lot so: The avatar you'll find me using all over the Internet is of a blue jig-saw puzzle piece. His name is "Puzzy" and you'll find him running around Collectivus as a Thingie.

Contact

Online Communities

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Professional Profile and Projects

Collective Detective

CD is a micro-business I founded in 2002 to create interesting social gaming and entertainment applications. We've participated, designed, and consulted on a few transmedia, interactive experiences of the years.

Collectivus

I'm currently working on Collectivus, a social location game currently available as a small prototype. We have a few hundred physical rubber ducks, and thousands of virtual objects located all over the world — we call them "Thingies." These Thingies travel from place to place, each recording a narrative of the places they've been and people they've encountered. This creates a unique way to randomly discover new people, places, and stories when a Thingie is encountered. I wear many hats on the project: Creator, Co-Designer, Product Manager, and Co-Developer. A small team scattered across the U.S. works on Collectivus.

Other Places to Find Collectivus

Interactive One

Director of Social and Local Products

In 2011, I was recruited by Interactive One to re-imagine and modernize their flagship online product: BlackPlanet. So we created BlackPlanet Next, a social curation engine that allows the BlackPlanet community to create discussions from content on social networks such as Facebook, foursquare, and Twitter. BP Next also can filter and surface relevant trends and content across the membership base, social graph, and locations to highlight trends not seen as part of a larger social community.

BlackPlanet Next was launched into beta in February of 2012.

MapQuest

Senior Product Manager and Evangelist / Business Development

Previously, I spent 7 years at MapQuest. I split my time mostly on three major areas: Social/Community Engagement and Outreach, Product Development and Management, and working as part of the Business Development team on Distribution initiatives.

Senior Software Engineer

I joined MapQuest as a developer, where I worked on modernizing the client-side code for MapQuest.com. I trained a team on XHTML, JavaScript, and CSS development and rewrote most of the front-end, working with the User Experience team to modernize the look and features of the site. I also worked as part of the team developing MapQuest APIs.

Notebook

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