Rock Jethwa is one of Canada’s top Interactive Architects and Interactive Producers, having designed & launched over 20+ mobile, web, desktop, IPTV and kiosk applications in the digital content and media industries.
He is responsible for designing the media player that at the time was on 1 out of every 3 cell phones sold in Canada (pre-iPhone), owing success by incorporating elements of usability best practices, user interface techniques, metrics analysis, call to action workflows & interactive storytelling.
Previously Rock was Manager of Portals and User Experience in TELUS Mobility’s ground breaking product development department. While at TELUS Mobility, his achievements included running one of the top 10 mobile and web portals, as well as launching North America’s first mobile homepage search engine, enabling advertising, app stores and digital content storefronts for 5 million customers. He was also head of the UI design team for the cross platform mobile, web, desktop and IPTV media platform, making it #2 behind iTunes in Canada.
While Toronto based, Rock has worked internationally in the interactive industry for over 15 years, having represented Canada at three G7/G8 technology conferences, as well as speaking on the future of broadband interactive TV and film production at an Italian Film Festival [AntennaCinema]. Early in his career, he worked at the SUMS Corp. think tank, based in the Marshall McLuhan offices, applying next generation 3D and video search to the Vatican Library Project, as well as projects with IBM Labs, Bell Northern Research & SGI-Silicon Graphics.
Prior to that, Rock worked on Apple Computer’s first web browser and pseudo-3D portal, codename Galaxy [which included sending a wireless digital picture from an Apple Newton PDA, Apple QuickTake camera and an ARDIS mobile pager; the Apple Newton PDA formed the foundation of the iPod/iPhone/iPad]. His first introduction to the Internet was putting his college radio music and news show online as well as experimenting with online jam sessions using early real time video and audio on Sun SPARKStations.
His first introduction to interactive media was in high school history class, where he gave a presentation on the history of the computer, using charts, graphs, animation print outs from an Icon trackball computer (which used the QNX Operating System, which is now used globally in automobile navigation systems and in the ultra high end 92 Tb/second “Cisco CRS-1” core network router). It was interspersed with video segments from the documentary “The Machine That Changed The World” on VHS tape , which was advanced interactive media technology at the time.
Rock attributes much of his love for design, technology and hard work to his grandfather, who made “must have” custom shoes and boots in London’s Camden district, for the likes of David Bowie and The Beatles, to name a few. His grandfather is immortalized in Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” album song “Nobody Home” with the lyric “I’ve got a pair of Gohills boots and I got fading roots”.
