Jochen "Joe" Savelberg

Jochen Savelberg is the founder of the EasyScopes Entertainment Network. As his German name is quite difficult to pronounce for non-German speaking people, he's opted for the nickname "Joe" in his international business dealings.

Despite his young age, Joe was born in 1975, he has led a very interesting life so far. His life has always been influenced by computers, media and communications. He is a writer, editor, publisher, programmer, consultant, radio show presenter, journalist, marketing director, customer support manager, and a lot of other things as well.

Joe started to use computers at the age of 9. At first the computers were only used to play games and for drawing and writing. He wrote his first database program in Basic when he was 11.

While still in high school, he was involved in the largest Macintosh User Group in Europe (Mactivity International - macclub benelux) with more than 16,000 members. The User Group was run by his father and published a monthly newsletter on disk. Joe joined the User Group as contributing editor and programmer for the electronic magazine and in-house tools. He also created advertising campaigns, brochures and CD-ROMs for the user group. In 1990 he took over the responsibility for the online systems of the user group, expanding the BBS into an international network of BBS systems in 3 countries with connections to a network in the USA. During this expansion, he helped Belgacom - the state-owned telco in Belgium - to track down a serious bug in ISDN routing to other European countries.

At high school, Joe took advanced lessons in maths, science, computers and languages. He's fluent in 4 languages: German (native), French (studies), English (favorite), Dutch (family). He only regrets that he didn't take any courses in business administration. Joe has been the editor of the school magazine and also the editor-in-chief for his school when they participated in the international "Journalist For A Day" project. The school presented him with the Rotary Award of Comradeship for being a helpful and reliable team-player.

Once he got his high school certificate in 1993, Joe went on a 6 month AFS student exchange to Australia where he attended high school and joined the volunteers of the school magazine. Putting his computer and design skills to good use, he was responsible for the layout and some content of the magazine.

After he returned from Australia, he attended university and college in Belgium. However he dropped out before getting a degree. Still at university, he implemented a strategy to start an ISP (Internet Service Provider) business with his father. Euregio.Net has become the largest ISP business in the German-speaking part of Belgium.

He got hooked by the World Wide Web and started to create his own websites. His goal has always been to combine his programming interests with publishing and marketing. The World Wide Web is the ideal platform for this. In February 1996, he launched his LoveTest site. Soon afterwards, the EasyScopes® website was created. These sites have displayed more than 170 million pageviews since they were started. His entertainment network has always been a profitable operation, getting visitors through word of mouth and search engines.

Joe spends a lot of time reading and developing ideas and giving them away... In 1997, he received an award for creating the most visited website in Belgium and he was one of the 6 winners for the best idea to celebrate New Year's Eve 1999 in Times Square (New York City). Some companies who implemented some of his ideas include LinkExchange, SmartClicks, Rendez-Vous, AstroAdvice, SPREADscope, Andlinger & Company, Internet Press, Netvertising, Regie Media Belge (RMB), IntelliBanner, ActiveConcepts, Maxum Development, Central Ad. Discussing ideas is one of his favorite pastimes.

In the last couple of years, Joe attended a lot of Internet conferences around the world. Before starting the ISP business, he went to several technology conferences in San Jose, San Francisco and Boston. In the last 2 years, he primarily went to online advertising and marketing conferences, such as ad:tech.SanFrancisco, ad:tech.Europe and ad:tech.NewYork. He was also invited to speak at several Internet conferences such as SmartAge.com's Millionth Member Party in February 2000 in San Francisco.

More information including non-work related hobbies and affiliations can be found on this page: click here

The press release for the Times Square 2000 Festivities can be found on this page: click here (Yahoo)

Joe's IQ as computed by the popular IQ Test web site. An online MENSA IQ test showed a lower score of around 154. Some teachers at the University of Liege might argue that his IQ score should be below zero.