SS9173, Great analysis. I was looking at Mobot's website just a few minutes ago. They have 9 management employee biographies posted. I am sure that there are a few worker bees to boot. Might have to bump the guesstimate up.
Alan
Mobot is led by a world-class management team with entrepreneurial and executive expertise in mobile technology, visual recognition, internet content and services, advertising, marketing and media.
Russell Gocht, Founder and CEO
Russell Gocht founded Mobot in September 2003 to pursue the application of recent advances in image processing to the market opportunity represented by the rapid adoption of camera phones in the consumer marketplace. He recognized early on that wirelessly enabled image capture capability in the hands of 100s of millions of consumers could be harnessed to create new applications and solve critical usability constraints inherent to mobile devices. Russell conceived the vision for Mobot while on staff at Atlas Venture as Entrepreneur in Residence in 2002 and 2003.
Prior to joining Atlas Venture, Russell led the creation of the Xevo product suite, an enterprise class software platform sold to carriers such as British Telecom, Bell Canada, and Qwest. As Vice President of Engineering, he was instrumental in raising three rounds of venture capital investment in the company totaling $41 million, and built a world class engineering team from 1 to 42, in 19 months. At Shiva Corporation he was responsible for the creation of a technology licensing and OEM relationship with IBM which led to a successful IPO in 1994, and market capitalization of $2.6B. As Vice President of Software Engineering, he led an international development team which delivered the market leading Shiva LanRover remote access product line. He was also responsible for propagating Shiva technology through Windows95, Windows NT, and Netscape, increasing the distribution of Shiva technology to reach 100s of millions of users. Earlier in his career Russell led innovations in communications products at both Microcom and Motorola.
Russell holds a BS degree from the University of Connecticut and an MS degree from the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, both in electrical and computer engineering. Russell has several granted and pending patents. And he serves as a member of the board of directors of the Titus Foundation.
Kevin Wells, Vice President of Business Development
For the past 15 years, Kevin Wells has been in key management roles in a variety of media focused technology firms. Most recently he served as the Vice President, Business Development at BzzAgent Inc, a highly successful new media marketing agency with clients such as Coca-Cola, Anheuser-Busch, Ralph Lauren, Estee Lauder, DuPont, Kellogg’s, Broadcom, and others. BzzAgent was recently profiled by Forbes, WWD, and Fast Company.
Prior to BzzAgent, Kevin co-founded Mitigo, Inc, a mobile software development company delivering visual symbol reading solutions for wireless devices to mobile telephone and PDA OEMs. The company marketed mobile software to Asian and European handset manufacturers, and on the PDA platform, through strategic relationships with HP/Compaq, Casio, and Sharp.
Earlier in his career, Kevin was a founding partner, and Vice President, Business Development for OneZero Media. OneZero was the exclusive producer of the AltaVista.com entertainment channel and produced a nationally televised program about the Internet called “WildWildWeb.” CBS successfully syndicated the TV program for three seasons. He was principally responsible for channel sales and marketing efforts, e-commerce and advertising, and created more than 200 content partner business relationships. OneZero Media, Inc., was acquired by GT Interactive Software (Nasdaq:GTIS) in 1998.
Prior to OneZero, Kevin served in a variety of roles with Ziff-Davis Publishing. As a founding Director of ZDNet.com, the leading technology web portal, he was a principal business architect of computershopper.com. He also led the ZDNet advertising consultancy for key clients such as Hewlett Packard, IBM, Gateway, and others.
Lauren Bigelow, Vice President of Marketing and Product Management
Lauren brings to Mobot a successful record of envisioning and producing wireless and web products. Most recently as Vice President and GM of Product Management at Lycos, Lauren was responsible for new product initiatives and managed community, blogging, and networking products including Tripod.com and Angelfire.com.
Earlier, as Vice President of Marketing and Product Management for SkyGo (bought by Enpocket), she led the development of the SkyGo Mobile Advertising Platform™ and pioneered the use of wireless marketing, taking SkyGo from its concept stage through groundbreaking market trials in the US, Japan and Hong Kong, to its status as a leading wireless advertising company with customers including Vodaphone kk in Japan as well as MTV, Chevy Trucks, ESPN, Visa, Procter & Gamble, KFC, and Subway in the US.
Prior, as Director of Content Development at Alta Vista, she oversaw all content development for that search portal. As a consultant to the founder, Lauren helped develop the first prototype of Drugstore.com. As Director of Products and Content at Cybersmith, the pioneer cyber café chain, she made emerging technologies fun, accessible, and understandable to average consumers. She launched her career at Houghton Mifflin Company where she built the company's first lexical analysis tools and founded the award-winning interactive education site, Education Place (www.eduplace.com).
Lauren Bigelow holds a BS from Tufts University and was voted one of the "Top 25 Most Wired Women in Boston."
Mark Bees, Vice President of Market Development
A wireless industry veteran, Mark brings over twenty years of wireless consumer sales and marketing experience to Mobot. Mark has held leadership positions with major US wireless carriers including Cingular Wireless where he ran the Southern New England region as Vice President and General Manger. At Cingular, Mark lead 650 employees, managed all functional area directors including multi-channel sales, marketing, network, customer care and had P&L responsibility of $1Billion. Under his direction he helped launch Cingular Wireless - the combination of thirteen disparate regional wireless companies forming one nationwide brand.
Prior to Cingular, Mark was Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Cellular One Boston, an SBC company where Mark managed all aspects of sales and marketing for the region. Mark has held various Chicago-area entrepreneurial posts including Vice President and General Manager of Continental Communications a multi-location Cellular One retailer (sold to SBC), Vice President of Cellular Phone Services (sold to Continental Communications) and General Sales Manager of Comtech Inc. (sold to SBC). An early champion of what have now become industry-wide promotional offers including free nights and weekends, mobile to mobile calling, shared minute plans and SMS mobile marketing initiatives, Mark has the foresight to craft mobile marketing campaigns that will break new ground.
Mark is experienced in the areas of viral marketing and event marketing. His charitable efforts at apparel company Life is good® producing the 2004 Life is good® Pumpkin Festival helped raise over $100K for children facing life threatening illnesses and drew 50K attendees from around New England and the world. Mark has consulted for entertainment industry luminaries, including Sean “P Diddy” Combs in his efforts to enter the lucrative wireless content arena.
Mark holds a BFA from the University of Iowa.
Eric Hedman, VP Engineering
As founder and CTO of NextRadio, Eric created the first interactive audio "jukebox" on the Web, and has more than seven years of experience in the online music business. Eric was responsible for all of NextRadio’s architecture decisions, and provided strategic guidance on next-generation product functionality.
Prior to NextRadio, Eric was a lead architect at Raptor Systems; and prior to that, a lead architect at Open Market. Previous to his software experience, Eric sharpened his analytical problem solving and discovery skills over a seven year stint at Bell Labs.
Eric holds an MBA, Masters of Engineering, and Bachelor of Science degrees from Cornell University.
Hian-Thai Tjen, Messaging Architect
Thai has 15+ years experience in software design and implementation from large multinationals to startup companies, mostly in telecom-related fields. He spent several years developing enterprise network management systems at Motorola and Hewlett-Packard Singapore where he was a technical member of the HP OpenView development team. He also spent several years developing voice applications and SS7 call signaling systems at Vicorp and Voicetek, followed by Harris and Jeffries where he developed standard-based network protocol stacks such as ATM and Frame Relay.
In recent years, he has been developing systems in the multimedia arena. In his position at Next Radio Solutions, he architected the media content management system, implementations of Digital Rights Management technologies for the music download service, and the security layer of the audio streaming services. Prior to Next Radio, he was at Broadcastle as a member of the team that developed the network-based digital home audio/video system. Prior to Broadcastle, Thai was at Xevo architecting the usage-based applications metering system.
Thai received his Computer Science degree from Boston University.
Pam Lipson, Image Scientist
Pamela Lipson is a founder of Imagen Incorporated. Imagen creates computer vision software packages that allow computers to intelligently analyze images, recognize objects and perform object validation assessments that may be too challenging for human inspectors. Imagen's technology was borne out of research in biological and machine vision done by Pamela and several colleagues at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Beyond Imagen, Pamela has been working with her husband, Prof. Pawan Sinha, on Project Prakash, a humanitarian and scientific initiative to facilitate the treatment of congenitally blind children. Recently, Pamela has been recognized for developing a technology for encoding alphanumeric and graphical information with high density on crystalline substrates.
Pamela received her B.A from Harvard University and an M.S. and Ph.D. from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, where her doctoral research was honored with the George M. Sprowls Award for exception research. Pamela has recently been recognized by the MIT Technology Review as one of 100 innovators under 35 whose work and ideas will change the world and also by the World Economic Forum as a technology pioneer.
Eric Healy, Advisor
As a senior member of Arnold Worldwide’s advertising team, Eric brings a wide array of brand building and multi-channel marketing skills to the agency’s Integrated Solutions Group. In his role as Vice President / Director, Eric is responsible for Arnold clients including Vonage, Volkswagen, Fidelity Investments, Royal Caribbean, and Brown-Forman Corporation. In leading the Interactive practice area at Arnold, Eric’s P&L responsibilities span 88 employees and $75 million in agency capitalized billings. In addition, Eric also serves as a founding member of Arnold’s youth marketing practice, where he provides ad hoc consultation to clients like McDonald’s, Coors, Puma and American Legacy Foundation.
Prior to his employment at Arnold, Eric served as Vice President, Strategy Group at Digitas, where he led the company’s Boston-based, retail practice. Clients included Neiman Marcus, L.L. Bean, Ann Taylor, Williams-Sonoma, Best Buy, Xerox, General Motors and American Express. Eric served as founding Director of eCommerce and Global Direct Marketing at Reebok International Limited, across the company’s portfolio brands including Reebok, Rockport, Greg Norman, Polo Sport and Ralph Lauren Footwear. Eric also founded The Rockport Company’s interactive group in1997.
Eric holds dual Master of Science degrees in Management and Marketing from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He is a member of the American Marketing Association, Association of Internet Professionals and Association of Interactive Media.
John Puopolo, Technical Advisor
John serves as the Director of Technology Alliances for FAST, a successful enterprise search platform software company. While at FAST, he has integrated FAST InStream into OEM client products including EMC's Centera, Computer Associates' Cleverpath and Documentum's Content Server. Prior to joining FAST, John served as Vice President of Engineering at International Wireless, Inc., where he delivered mobile applications for PDAs and handsets across a variety of operating systems and platforms – in less than 6 months, the core product ran across 3 operating systems, in 2 languages and integrated seamlessly with a variety of off-the-shelf components.
John has held leadership positions at Boston-area start-up companies, holding key technical positions from Chief Architect to CTO, and has a proven track record of success. He has delivered commercial, high-quality software products to market including Lavastorm's Revel and Echo, Enliven Producer, an award-winning PC application, Lotus Components Framework, and CodePoint, a symbol recognition and decoding system for mobile devices. John started his career at large enterprise companies including the Boston Company, Fidelity Investments and Lotus/IBM.
In addition to his commercial responsibilities, John also serves on the adjunct faculty of Northeastern University’s School of Continuing Education where he develops and teaches state-of-the-art classes including C# Programming, .NET Development, Java Programming and Wireless Device Programming. John Puopolo is also the author of Writing OLE Controls, A Practical & Comprehensive Approach published by Prentice-Hall.
AI
