College of Engineering 50th Anniversary

To celebrate the College of Engineering’s Golden 50th Anniversary in 2012, a series of events are planned on the Davis campus and in the Bay Area. Exhibitions at UC Davis, website features, and special events will celebrate the first 50 years of the College of Engineering, and enlarge the vision for our success in the next half-century.

College of Engineering Notable Biographies

 

TIM BUCHER

One of entrepreneur Tim Bucher's most recent ventures proves an old adage: At TastingRoom.com, good things truly do come in small packages.

50-milliliter bottles, to be precise.

Thanks to a process Bucher patented, TastingRoom.com allows client wineries to offer "sample kits" of their wines to consumers, and as sales tools for retailers and distributors. Bucher's clean-room technology — dubbed TASTE, for "total anaerobic sample transfer environment" — ensures that the wines aren't tainted by oxygen or other contaminants when transferred from larger containers to the small sample bottles.

TastingRoom.com is merely one of Bucher's successful startup companies. In 2002, he founded Ispiri, a software, services and appliance company that provided solutions for personal digital content protection and management. Ispiri led to Bucher's development of Mirra, a company known for its powerful computer back-up drive. He followed those successes with ZING Systems, famed for the wireless network technology that connects consumers to their favorite music and entertainment services. ZING technology quickly was embraced by Sirius Satellite Radio, SanDisk and other corporations.

Over the years, Bucher has sold four of his companies for a combined total of more than $1 billion.

Not a shabby result for a farm kid from Healdsburg, Calif., who as an undergraduate entered UC Davis with the intention of designing tractors. Fate had other plans: The aspiring engineer's life was changed by a freshman computer class.

"I quickly became fascinated by the subject," he said, during a 2010 interview, "and realized that this was something I might want to pursue."

Bucher graduated from UC Davis in 1986, with a degree in electrical engineering. He subsequently "pursued" his chosen profession with a vengeance. During the next two decades, he served in key executive roles for the "big three": Bill Gates at Microsoft, Steve Jobs at Apple, and Michael Dell at Dell.

Bucher credits UC Davis for expanding his awareness of the possibilities in technology and entrepreneurship. By way of thanks, he and his family recently endowed the Tim Bucher Family Chair of Computer Science.

Such grandiose endeavors notwithstanding, Bucher also remains active in the olive oil and wine industries, which allow him to remain close to his agricultural roots.
And some things haven't changed:

"I still get some of my best new high-tech ideas while driving my tractors."

For more information on the College of Engineering's 50th Anniversary Celebration, please email Oliver Ramsey.