Paul Sarena

CEO for iTools (2008-present)

• Architect and implement a hyperconnected web application including backend stack and frontends for desktop and mobile
• Still in stealth – will have more to say at public launch

Sabbatical (2006-2007)

• Multi-year exploratory travel and world-wide cultural study. Excerpts from unpublished manuscript at PoJoGo
• Global citizen perspective: Understands the motivations of and can relate with people across many of the world's cultural, socioeconomic and philosophical boundaries
• Became conversational in Spanish, adding to established French and underpracticed German

Business Development & Product Management, Connected Home Platform for DivX (2005-2006)

• Market development: Initiated and coordinated a world-wide cooperation of IC chip, consumer electronics CE, ODM/OEM, Software ISV and Internet/media services companies to build and launch a connected home platform
• Enlisted 9 largest media software companies (excepting Microsoft) to port their media suites to DivX Connected platform
• Business development & M&A: Identify, court, value and due diligence for strategic partnerships and acquisitions
• Set requirements, prioritize Engineering teams (desktop software and CE system software/middleware)

Sr. Business and Platform Architect for DivX (2003-2005)

Business development and system architecture for video on demand (VOD) systems for service providers (telcos, MSOs & media portals) for PC and consumer electronics (CE) devices.

• Built and enacted business plan for video platform for broadband network operators (strategy, market, financials and product definitions)
• Standard specification for network-connected CE devices for video delivery, DRM, provisioning, device management and user interfaces and led the implementation and launch of a major European telco's VOD system
• Established strategic partnerships with consumer electronics ICs/ODMs/OEMs
• Managed and participated in a Fortune 500 consulting engagement to implement a global enterprise video system
• Managed Fortune 500 engagement for global terrestrial and sea platform wireless LAN and WAN infrastructure; introduced methodology that saves $2 million in G&A annually
• Prepared and supervised responses to several RFI and RFQs representing $5 million in new buisness

CTO of Compium (2002-2003)

Built web and backend infrastructure for an outsourced technical support and online data backup service. Responsible for all facets of system design and development.

• Designed, developed and implemented custom e-commerce system for customer accounts, automated billing, reporting and tracking
• Integration with credit card processing and online storage service providers as extensible Web Services
• Affiliate / reseller system for revenue-sharing with advanced tracking and reporting capabilities and automated disbursements

CEO of iTools (1995-1998, 2000-Present)

Created a popular Internet service providing tools for information retrieval and manipulation. Responsible for all facets of design, development, administration and growth of business.

• Established revenue-generating strategic partnerships and increased regular user base to over 500,000
• Built scalable template-driven web site generator, query tool router, news and information aggregator, XML search results interpreter, ...
• Designed the award-winning user-centric interface as modular components using stylesheets and cross-browser HTML and JavaScript
• Installed, configured and administered Unix server system with 99.999% uptime over 18 months
• iTools is featured in dozens of books, magazines and best-of lists; ranks highly in search engines (#1 on Google and Yahoo for "research" and "find")

Manager, Research & Development for INTERVU (1999)

Lead and participated in the research and development of new technologies and business opportunities utilizing INTERVU's massively distributed network

• Established department, hired and managed internal and external developers, replicated the distributed streaming network in-house to serve research and engineering needs
• Planned and contributed to the design and development of a redundant and fail-safe distributed reporting system, aggregating logs and realtime data from hundreds of servers on multiple platforms, improving accuracy from ~70% to 99.99% and availability from monthly to near-realtime
• Managed technical relationships with software vendors and third party suppliers and served on the task force for all serious client-impacting and revenue-affecting technical and network issues

Product Manager for INTERVU (1998-1999)

Managed development process of new streaming media products and services utilizing INTERVU's distributed network of live and on-demand video servers

• Developed product definitions, marketing requirements, functional specifications and performed pricing and competitive analysis
• Provided product advocacy and expertise in customer and vendor relations
• Represented customer and network requirements in product development, engineering, and deployment decisions
• Projects include: network publishing tools, IP audio/videoconferencing, audience management tools, traffic reporting, live and on-demand multimedia presentations with video of the presenter, radio stations, ...

Sr. Project Manager for INTERVU (1998)

Responsible for all Rich Media customer support functions and development of V-Banners (streaming video ad banners)

• Managed and participated in the development of INTERVU's Rich Media systems including upgrades to its distributed network of video delivery centers resulting in a 120-fold increase in performance and capacity
• Established processes and procedures for customer management and support as the department grew from three to fifty
• Standardized and built cross-browser video ad banner format and coding, reducing customer integration process from 320 man-hours to thirty minutes
• Executed an array of rich media advertising campaigns (first on the Internet): specified, designed and implemented platform, browser and plugin-independent support for video ad banners

Lead Software Engineer for Berkeley Systems Inc. (1995-1997)

• Developed back end for After Dark Online 4.0 and Web.Max 1.0; server-push news gatherer and publisher to download, parse, store & publish arbitrary real-time content; light-duty database for content indexing and storage

Computer Systems Analyst for TIP Networks (1994-1995)

• Specified, developed and deployed software applications for embedded systems: 911 call center, Canada Post parcel distribution monitoring, building access security, industrial energy consumption monitoring, ...

President of Computer Wares (1990-1994)

• Originated retail computer hardware and software sales, assembly, installation and support business; accounting, purchasing, marketing ...

Computer Science, System Architecture

Programmer-Analyst

Pure & Applied Science

Bilingual High School (English, French)

Development Skills

• Life cycle management, planning, scheduling, tracking
• System analysis, design, coding and optimization
• Prototyping, testing methodology, training & technical writing
• User interface design

Programming & Scripting Languages

• Perl, C, C++, SQL, Visual Basic, Pascal (Delphi), COBOL, x86 Assembly
• Shell scripts, batch files, JavaScript (with DOM)
• mod_perl handlers, CGI, PHP, ASP, Template Toolkit, Cold Fusion

Network Protocols

• IP, TCP, UDP, RTP/RTSP/RTCP, ICMP, DHCP
• DNS, LDAP, NetBIOS/IP
• HTTP, FTP, Telnet, SMTP, POP3, IMAP4, NNTP, Jabber
• SSL-TLS, SSH, NTP, TFTP, SNMP, RTSP, ...

Document Standards

• XML DTDs, Schemas, Markup (SOAP, XSL/XSLT, WML, RDF, SMIL, ...)
• XHTML 1.0/1.1, HTML 4.01/4.0/3.2/2.0 (cross-browser), CSS

Operating Systems (Developing for, administering & using)

• Windows 3.1 to 7 and everyting in between
• UNIX: Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris
• DOS, Novell Netware, Windows CE (Pocket PC) & Palm OS

Applications & Server Software

• Apache, Sendmail/Exif, IIS, Exchange, SSH, Samba, FTP, VNC
• Oracle, Sybase, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Access, FoxPro, dBASE, ...
• Microsoft Office, Project, Visio; outliners and mind mappers
• Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere; Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, Director, Generator, Dreamweaver
• ... and hundreds of other desktop and server applications