John Veenstra

Entrepreneur and Inventor, The John and Elizabeth Veenstra Foundation

Raised in the small town of Fremont Michigan, John Veenstra has led a life of inventing with nearly 40 years of creating new inventions, and entrepreneurial ventures. Veenstra is an entrepreneur, inventor and philanthropist. Currently he is pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in Asia, Europe and the Middle East. In the late 1960s, John created the first of his many innovations – the process of automated manufacturing portion control and an investment aggregation system for the commercial paper market. In the early 1980’s, with the introduction of IBM’s first PC, John started one of the early PC retail businesses. Boardroom Business Products became one of the largest retail chains and featured an innovative central configuration and delivery system. In the early 1990’s John shifted focus to software with the invention of electronic forms. In 1995, John began working on patented inventions associated with the newly emerging Internet and patented geographic search under US patent 5930474. He founded Zland.com, in 1995, where he lead the team that created the first tools for database publishing into HTML pages; the first online industry portal, school site, community site and yellow page site; and created the Application Service Provider (ASP) industry. John Veenstra, formerly, the CEO of GeoTag Management Group of Plano, Texas. Using GeoTag location based technology, Veenstra continues to lead innovation, technology and marketing of new product lines ranging from geographic search engines, yellow pages, B2B exchanges, financial services and fraud protection services, as well as geographic subscription services. After the sale of Geotag Management Group in 2009, Veenstra currently is pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in Asia, Europe and the Middle East.