- Brings vision, leadership and technical chops to evolve information and communication technologies
- Architects, sparks and nurtures market-wide cooperation on new platforms
Professional Experience
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 Excerpts from unpublished manuscript at PoJoGo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 ...
Education
Computer Science, System Architecture
Concordia University, Montreal, QC. (1995-1996)
Programmer-Analyst
Herzing Institute, Montreal, QC. (1993-1994)
Obtained C.E.C. with highest grade average of graduating class
Pure & Applied Science
John Abbott College, Ste-Anne de Bellevue, QC. (1991-1992)
Bilingual High School (English, French)
Pierrefonds Comprehensive H.S., Pierrefonds, QC. (1986-1991)
High School Diploma with Honors / Departmental Award for Excellence in Art
Technical Skills
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