Andy Walker

Early in his boyhood, it was science, and more specifically medicine, that fascinated Andy Walker. Perhaps because doctors were mostly nice and they seem to help his mom with her headaches caused by his twin brothers.

But it wasn't until he almost failed organic chemistry in junior college that he had second thoughts about a career as a doctor. That, plus he realized sick people make a lot of grumpy moaning noises.

Luckily, he did a journalism degree at Ryerson University in Toronto and started a career in newspapers. He wasn't fond of knocking on dead people's doors, but heck, it was a living.

His first jobs included a stint at the Toronto Sun, a tabloid metro daily. The lowlight of this career move was a page one story about a raccoon stuck up a tree. Later, Walker worked for the CBC where he witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall from inside a national TV newsroom and the resident anchorman's impressive vocabulary of profanity.

He went on to work for an insurance magazine and it was here that he found an interest in electronic publishing (and mockery of insurance broker toupees). After winning an award for his magazine work and getting a nice plaque, and a nicer check he summarily left journalism to explore the film business in Vancouver. There he dabbled in screenwriting film publicity and walk-on acting (Double Happiness, bar patron #2!).

At the same time, he returned to journalism working as a general assignment reporter at the Vancouver Province, a daily metro newspaper, where he wrote about crime and police. The local cops learn to hate him when he baited witnesses away from a hospital waiting room with a promise of a free ride home in his orange Czech-made Skoda.

It was technology that steered him back to journalism. In '95, he became a key player in putting the Southam newspaper chain on the Web. He's one of the architects of the smash success Canada.com. Walker went on to train at MSNBC in Redmond, WA with a bunch of Germans from MSNBC.de.

Then he joined a pioneering team that launched MSN.ca's news service between 1997 and 1999. It was so pioneering that they shut it down in late 1999. Undeterred, Andy happily left Microsoft and leveraged his career as a journalist by writing about technology for the Edmonton Journal newspaper.

Subsequently, his column "Cyberwalker", a tech advice column was published across Canada. This became Cyberwalker.com, which at its peak attracted more than 3.5 million unique visitors each year including six people from Zambia.

During the dotcom boom, Andy wrote about technology for some of Canada's most prestigious news outlets including the National Post and the Toronto Star. His work was syndicated around the world and has been translated into French, Spanish and Italian, and Farsi.

Walker has contributed to the highly acclaimed enRoute magazine, In magazine (Chilean airlines mag) and MoneySense, Canada's foremost personal finance magazine. He also appeared on the cover of the Oct 2003 issue, with cellphones covering his eyes.

Walker has appeared as a tech expert on zillions of TV and radio broadcasts in Canada and the U.S. In 2002, Walker moved to Berkeley, California to work with publishing pioneer David Bunnell, founder of PC magazine, to launch Dig_iT magazine. It was fun, but they ran out of money.

Between 2004 and 2005, he co-produced and co-hosted the internationally syndicated TV show Call for Help with Leo Laporte. He also co-founded the massively popular video podcast LabRats.tv. On the show, he sometimes demonstrated how technology works using cheese, marshmellows and mentos mints.

Walker became quite good at making money with the web and he ended up getting hired by Tucows as General Manager of Tucows.com. While there he built the video web site butterscotch.com which was really good but expensive to run. Kids on YouTube could make video cheaper and didn't have any studio overhead.

Today he is a digital strategist helping people weave their web traffic into gold and supporting sales teams with lead generation. He has built numerous successful properties including TomorrowsGasPriceToday.com with consumer advocate Dan McTeague. They sold the property to GasBuddy.com in 2014.

He runs more than 24 websites and coaches and consults.

Walker is based in Grimsby, Ontario. He is 53 and still has most of his hair. He has a called Carter with his wife and Super You co-author Kay Walker (nee Svela)

He is also the author of five non-fiction books on technology and one children's book called The Boy With a Stinky Finger released in February 2021. His second kids book is expected by April 2021. It is called: Oops Pooped in the Lake!