PAST
Born in 1979 Lars enthusiastically started to explore the world wide web in 1994. He envisioned that it – one day – would be the biggest collection of knowledge and the most profitable marketplace on the globe.
One idea however presented him with exceptional ridicule: it was in 1997 when he shared the vision of an encyclopedia everyone could contribute to with his friends and family. (In 2000 Wikipedia was launched.)
In 1999 he started his career on the German insurance market where he received exceptionally detailed insight into marketing and sales which would later on help him to understand the importance and complexity of issues like persuasion by wording, imagery, etc.
During his vocational training he also devoted a large quantity of time on issues like customer service and customer life cycle and the possibilities of automating these and other processes to increase the efficiency of an organization. (About 2 years after realizing this corporations like SAP, Oracle and PeopleSoft launched their large scale CRM efforts)
Later on during that period of his life and very bothered by banner advertisements he thought of an intelligent advertisement system (Google Adsense was born about 2 years after that) which he is still perfecting today.
Along with the start of his first website development efforts in the late 90s came the conclusion that internal software applications like knowledge management systems, customer relationship management applications and intranets could also be developed to be opened in a browser which would make it easier for organizations to deploy these solutions free or operating system dependencies which would significantly increase flexibility.
In 2004 Lars started Deutsche Webdesign, a firm which specialized in customized web solutions focused on usability, rich designs and search engine optimized programming.
In early 2008 he was invited to give a speech about search engine optimization on the Dutch Joomla Dagen which triggered a shift of paradigm for him.
In mid 2008 he dropped executive responsibilities in his company and became and independent consultant for web strategy and e-business development.
PRESENT
Presently, Lars Hilse is considered one of the foremost authorities in context to creating leaders of the digital economy.
He believes that every organization is unique and thus the business cases he develops together with his clients are always most individually forged to meet their specific demands regardless of what business they are in.
The assignments he has successfully completed range from simple advice to clients who wanted to utilize the internet to deploy their products of services up to the creation of most complex business cases and feasibility studies.
His work is backed up by his own company Deutsche Webdesign, which serves as the executive branch and his assistants which are responsible for the documentation of his assignments but are kept out of operations.
His extensive travel schedule has given him great opportunity to apply a lot of the knowledge he gathered about decentralized, offline working thus proving him right in this context also.
Even today Lars remains a visionary and even though the thoughts he suggests to his clients may seem futuristic a lot of times, they will be ever more real because of the lag involved between design and actual implementation.
He was born in 1979 and the place he so rarely sees and which he refers to as home is in the very north of Germany.
FUTURE
Even though Lars does not like this question, he answered it for the sake of this website with: “As long as I’m going to be around I’m going to make sure that the world becomes a better place by giving equal access to every piece of information to everyone equally regardless of their race, sex, demographic, age, or geographic location”.
His visions of one central place representing total freedom of speech for all human beings equally will probably will be the drive in his life as well as him encouraging people to use the web to also feed it with information as opposed of only drawing it.
