Joe Mohen

His maternal great-grandfather, James Morris, an immigrant from Liverpool, was one of the first full time staff of any motion picture studio, being hired by Adolph Zukor in 1912, at Famous Players, making sets for the silent films at Chelsea Studios in Manhattan; Famous Players was later merged with a competitor and renamed Paramount Pictures.

"This is really promising that the labels are going to finally stop kvetching and start thinking intelligently about where their money's going to come from in the 21st century," said Aram Sinnreich, of Radar Research, being quoted in the Los Angeles Times.

Mohen was born in the New York City borough of Queens, the oldest of twelve children of Joseph Conrad Mohen (1935-2017) and Virginia Ann (Kelly) Mohen (born 1935), both descendants of Irish immigrants.

Joseph T. Mohen (born July 19, 1956) works in holographic attractions.

In 1960, when Mohen was four, the family moved to Garden City on Long Island.

There he attended a local Catholic School, St. Anne’s, and later an Episcopal Preparatory School, St. Paul’s; while in high school he attended Boys State, and was captain of the Cross Country and Track teams.

He was offered a track scholarship to the University of Ohio, which he declined, instead electing to attend Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where he studied Mathematics and Biochemistry, and Manhattan College in New York City studying Business.

Mohen started his career working for Chase Bank on Wall Street, and became an officer at Citibank at 24 years old.

Having worked as a software engineer for six years, Mohen became a Certified Computer Professional in Systems Development in 1985.

In 1987, Proginet created a complex software package called XCOM, which sold in 1992 to a predecessor company of Computer Associates, and was one of the software products to span more than eleven computer operating systems.

Mohen also was a contributing editor and columnist for eWeek, Data Communications Magazine, and Network World; in 1989, he wrote a widely quoted article, called "Seeking a Cure for the Vaporware Epidemic", writing "my own estimate is that at the time of announcement, 10% of software products don't actually exist ... Vendors that are unwilling to [prove it exists] shouldn't announce their packages to the press", blaming the press for not investigating claims by developers, saying "If the pharmaceutical industry were this careless, I could announce a cure for cancer today – to a believing press."

In 1990-1992, Mohen was a committee member for setting standards for Open Systems Interconnections Protocols, with representatives from computer and telecommunications organizations from around the world.

The following year he founded Proginet Corporation of which he served as CEO until September 1996, and remained a Chairman through 1998.

Mohen co-founded election.com, with which in 1999 he was able to recruit Jack Kemp and former Irish Taoiseach (i.e. Prime Minister) Garret Fitzgerald to the board.

He has been CEO of Nylon Media, best known for having been founder and CEO and co-founder of election.com, which ran the Arizona Democratic Primary in March 2000, the world’s first legally binding election conducted on the Internet, according to the company.

Mohen was also a force in creating the era of free legal music, as the founder of SpiralFrog, an ad-supported free music service, which even before Spotify was able secure the rights to free music distribution from the major record labels in return for a share of the advertising revenues; SpiralFrog ultimately failed because it not create an iPhone APP, but the licensees that he negotiated paved the way for the streaming music era.

election.com [sic] is best known for administering the 2000 Arizona Democratic presidential primary Internet election.

The company, originally called Votation.com, was started in part with equity investments from VeriSign and Accenture.

During the second week of March 2000, election.com administered the Arizona Democratic Presidential Primary, which was the first time in American history that a statewide election offered citizens the choice to cast their ballots over the web.

The candidates were Vice President Al Gore, Senator Bill Bradley, and Dr. Heather Harder.

Voter turnout was shocking: turnout was up more 500% versus the previous primary, and more than double the previous record turnout.

Six months later, the Internet Corporation for Assigning Names and Numbers (ICANN), the technical coordination body for the internet, chose election.com to run their worldwide vote for its board of directors.

Voters came from every continent.

Mohen expanded the company to New York, Washington, Texas, London, Paris, Sydney, Australia, and Christchurch, New Zealand, and saw Election.com named to the Red Herring 100, as well as its top 50 Private Companies list.

Mohen stepped down as CEO of election.com in 2001.

Two years after Mohen left, the public sector elections business of election.com was acquired by Accenture.

In late 2001, Mohen founded ParishPay, a Fintech company which automated handling of money for churches around the United States.

The company replaced the envelope system, whereby donations were placed into envelopes each Sabbath, with a system in which parish members could have their donations automatically debited from their bank or credit card accounts each month.

Shortly after its launch, the system was featured in a front page story in the New York Times, after signing the Catholic Dioceses of Chicago, San Jose, and Orlando, and ParishPay received Venture Capital financing in late 2002.

In February election.com acquired NewVoter.com with then internet entrepreneur and civil rights advocate Mark Strama (who was subsequently elected to the Texas State legislature in 2004), who joined election.com as Vice President.

In 2004, a focus group in New York City was held to determine how to solve the problem of young people stealing music.

One of the attendees in the focus group responded "Why don’t you just give away the music"….and show advertising during the downloads.

Most doubted the four major record labels would ever go along with the idea, especially the largest music company – Universal Music Group, Mohen set out to recruit directors from music and advertising to obtain the needed licenses.

Among those recruited included former CEOs Jay Bernman (IFPI), Frances Preston (BMI), and Robin Kent (Interpublic Universal McCann).

Finally, on August 28, 2006, the Financial Times reported in its lead story, that it had granted SpiralFrog the first ever license to give away its complete catalog of music to consumers for free, in return for a share of the advertising revenues.

Mohen sold his interest In ParishPay to start SpiralFrog, although ParishPay grew substantially and was later merged with SmartTuition; ParishPay was sold to Yapstone in April 2012.

Mohen started SpiralFrog, Inc. in an effort to create a market-driven solution to digital music piracy.

In March 2016, Mohen published a guest blog predicting the collapse of baseball World Series television revenues unless its schedule is revamped.

The renamed CA-XCOM was sold by Computer Associates through 2017.

As CEO, Mohen secured equity stakes from both Novell and Microsoft in Proginet; Proginet was later acquired by Tibco Software.