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About Tavultesoft
We at Tavultesoft are a small team of software developers and linguists working in Hobart, Tasmania. Tavultesoft began life in 1992, when our CEO Marc Durdin, as a teenager, wrote the first version of Keyman to allow QWERTY keyboards to type in Lao and Thai.
We owe our name, Tavultesoft, to the name of a small coastal village in Papua New Guinea where Marc lived for a short time. You can pronounce our name /tæˈvultiˌsɑft/. Our logo captures Tavultesoft's origin in this village, where there were no telephones, electricity, or computers.
In addition to our core team, we are grateful for a community of people around the globe who have contributed keyboards to Keyman. Their work makes it possible for you to type in hundreds of languages that would otherwise have no computer support.
Our Credentials
We value the support of our customers. To read some of the kind things customers are saying about us, visit our testimonials page.
Tavultesoft is a member of the Unicode Consortium. The Unicode Consortium is the non-profit organisation which develops the Unicode Standard, among other things. The Unicode Standard is the international standard for computer encoding of all the world's languages.
Tavultesoft is also a Microsoft Partner. This means Tavultesoft demonstrates the highest degree of competence in working with Microsoft technologies, with a specialization in Windows multilingual technologies.
Our People
Marc Durdin - CEO & Chief Developer
Marc wrote the first versions of our flagship product, Keyman, as a teenager while living in Laos, in between home schooling and riding his bicycle around town fixing NGO computers. After moving to Tasmania for University, where he completed a Bachelor of Computing degree, Marc worked with his wife for a year in Papua New Guinea as a volunteer with Australian Volunteers International. Marc continued part-time development of Keyman during and after University and started working full time on Tavultesoft's suite of Keyman projects in 2005.
As a small business owner, Marc juggles a wide variety of tasks, including development of Keyman Desktop, Keyman Developer and KeymanWeb, managing and growing the business and attending and presenting at conferences.
Outside work (and on his way to work) Marc still rides his bike and has been a keen participant in Bike for Bibles rides in Tasmania. He and his wife have two young daughters and live in the foothills of Mount Wellington. Marc has studied Lao, Thai and Tok Pisin, although he would admit that his grasp of all three languages is getting shaky!
Marc’s personal blog can be found at http://marc.durdin.net/ and his Twitter account is @MarcDurdin.
John Durdin - Keyboard & Software Development
John has lived, worked, and studied in Australia, Laos, Thailand, Papua New Guinea, the UK, and the US. He has a Ph.D. in astrophysics and is an experienced computational and field linguist. More importantly, he is Marc's father.
John does many development tasks for Tavultesoft, including designing Keyman keyboards. Recently, John created the CJK package of keyboards for KeymanWeb. In addition, John reviews and tests keyboards submitted to us by Keyman Developer users, working with developers to help them publish high quality layouts. John is also the creator of Lao Script for Windows and a key contributor to the development of KeymanWeb.
Peirce Baehr - Customer Relations & Development Assistant
As Tavultesoft's requisite American, Peirce is a proficient speaker of Yankee. Stateside he's lived in New York, LA, Chicago, Atlanta, DC, Vermont, and North Dakota. He's also worked or studied in Argentina, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and the UK. In addition to Yankee, Peirce can hold a conversation in Spanish, German, and Tok Pisin.
Peirce handles all of Tavultesoft's front line customer contact, both in sales and support. He also writes, edits, and polishes keyboard and Keyman help, maintains the knowledge base, and assists in website, keyboard, and Keyman testing and development.
When Peirce is not working for Tavultesoft, he is starting a small accommodations business and finishing by distance a double Masters in Linguistics and Church History. He lives with his wife and two daughters in the Hobart area.
Gary McMullan - Marketing & Sales
Gary has over 20 years of experience in Sales and Marketing in the ICT industry. In the early days of the Internet, Gary was an evangelist for the adoption of the internet as a way of changing the way we conduct business and improve the quality of our lives. He strives to understand the needs of his customers and works hard to ensure that their needs are met. He has travelled extensively and understands the challenges people face with communication in a multilingual environment.
Matthew Laverie - Commercial & Business Manager
Matthew has extensive experience in ICT entrepreneurship, IP protection and creation and comes from a background of Project and Services Management for projects in excess of $100M. He was a founding Co-Director of a successful ICT Company with 25 staff that fully transitioned the ownership to the senior staff. In addition to his work with Tavultesoft, Matthew has an ongoing interest in several companies and provides strategic, project and organisational advice to a number of clients and not for profit organizations.
