Eckart Wintzen is, by his own description, a businessman who looks like a hippie. He is passionate about the environment, and wants to put technology at the service of inter-human warmth.

What Eckart Wintzen really is: the only 6-foot-tall elf in existence. He has all the identifying characteristics: long silver hair; mischievous cherub face; a slightly wacky twinkle in the eyes; an infectious laugh; the ability to grant wishes, etc.

Eckart was born in a fishing village in Holland, and almost popped out while his mother was strolling on the beach. He restrained himself, however, and went on to study math and physics at Leiden University, work for 10 years for multinationals like Philips Computer Industrie and European Space Research, then established the information systems branch of the Dutch daughter company of American General Telephone in 1973. He bought the struggling company for 10 guilders in 1976 and renamed it BSO (Bureau voor Systeem Ontwikkeling or Bureau for Systems Development).

Fast forward: Eckart resigned in 1996 when BSO/Origin, with 10,000 employees and offices in 75 cities in 25 countries, merged with Philips, the place where he had started. He then began Ex’tent, a management and investment company that participates in a wide range of socially and/or environmentally responsible enterprises. Along the way, Eckart was instrumental in the success of Ben + Jerry’s Benelux and San Francisco’s Wired Magazine, is in his country a forfighter for fiber to the home, invented and brings to market a highly sophisticated video telephone that enables top quality picture with real eye contact. In January of 1997, a chance meeting at a conference bumped Eckart into Gary Platt, they did the Vulcan Mind Meld, and Expression was born. The rest, you might say, is history, but the history of Expression has really just begun.