The management of PocketThis is comprised of executives from Firefly,
Microsoft, Wildfire, Starbucks, and Oracle, MarketSoft, and
Anderson Consulting:
Nancy
Benovich Gilby
CEO
For 18 years, Nancy has been building successful
startups with the sole purpose of delivering outstanding products on the
cutting edge of high technology. To make this happen,
Nancy has
helped raise eight rounds of funding (the fuel) and has developed a unique, integrated
approach to company and market development (the
engine). Nancy's approach to company and market development has been studied extensively
including three case studies by the Harvard
Business School.
Most recently Nancy co-founded and served as VP
of Engineering and Product Development at
MarketSoft. MarketSoft, an East Coast E-Marketing company with
such blue chip customers as Fidelity and Compaq, was recently named the top private company on
Upside Today's E-Biz Applications and Commerce Winners list.
Prior to MarketSoft, Nancy's efforts in product
strategy and development contributed to four
successful companies, including Firefly (purchased by Microsoft),
Wildfire (purchased by Orange of the UK), Component Software
(co-founder, folded into Sun to become what is Java today),
and On Technology (a successful public
company).
Nancy received an M.S.E. and a B.S.E. from the University
of Michigan where she graduated with honors.
Jay Sullivan
Vice President Product Development
Jay has over ten years of experience building and shipping
enterprise software to the Fortune 500. Prior to founding PocketThis,
Jay was a Senior Development Manager at Oracle, where he
held a series of management and technical posts. Jay played a key role in developing
the Web-based products that form the core of Oracle's
market-leading Internet Business Intelligence suite: Oracle
Discoverer, an award-winning end-user query and analysis
tool for exploring business critical information; and
Oracle Express, a family of products for doing sophisticated
data analysis. Jay architected and managed the development of Express Web Agent, one
of the industry's first Web-based Business Intelligence
tools, which has been used to build several Oracle products
and custom systems at Fortune 500 companies over past
5 years. At Firefly, Jay played a key role in the design
of the Firefly Passport, now Microsoft Passport.
His work at Firefly was patented. Jay has a B.S. in Applied
Mathematics from Yale University.
John
E. McNulty
CTO
John has eleven years experience developing extremely
high performance software and services, the past four years
focused exclusively on the Web.
John most recently worked
with PocketThis co-founder Jonathan Sheena to bring Hotmail onto the
Microsoft Passport Network, the first and by far the largest
property to successfully launch on the Passport Network.
Prior to Microsoft, John was hired as Research Scientist
to develop Firefly's Recommendation algorithms, a position
that resulted in several patents in advanced collaborative
filtering algorithms. John architected and led development
of the Firefly Recommendation Engine that provided recommendations
for high-traffic sites like MyYahoo!, BarnesAndNoble.com,
Launch.com and ZDNet. John then switched to a
management role to lead several point releases
of both the Firefly Passport and Recommendation
products prior to acquisition of Firefly by Microsoft.
Prior to Firefly, John developed high performance
servers at The Analytic Sciences Corporation for real-time
sonar signal processing, massively parallel weather data processing
and real-time missile error propagation and correction algorithms.
John has an Masters in Computer Science/AI from UMass/Amherst
and a BS/EECS from MIT.
Jonathan Sheena
Chief Strategy Officer
Jonathan brings to PocketThis a strong technical background and understanding
of how to apply cutting edge technology to real
world problems. Most recently at Microsoft,
Jonathan and John McNulty brought Microsoft Passport to
Hotmail; with Hotmail, Passport.com has become one of the
top 15 highest traffic domains on the Web (MediaMetrix).
Prior to Microsoft, Jonathan was the lead architect of
the Firefly Personalized News system which was designed
for online newspaper publishers like the New York Times,
Knight Ridder, and New Century Network. Jonathan's career
began at MIT's Media Laboratory in 1992, where he was a
designer and primary architect of Fishwrap - the first web
based personalized newspaper on the Web which brought together
news from AP, Reuters, Gannet, ABC Radio, New York Times,
to name a few. Fishwrap became one of the first personalized
and community-driven sites on the Web.
Jonathan earned MEng and BS degrees from MIT.
John
Barabino
Vice President Business Development
John has a strong Business Development and product marketing background with
over 7 years in the high-tech industry. Prior to joining PocketThis, John
spent 3 years at Internet advertising leader DoubleClick. At DoubleClick,
John was Senior Director of Corporate Development where he was responsible for
leading all West Coast TechSolutions as well as the Email division M&A and
investments. He was also Regional VP and General Manager of DART
Asia-Pacific, and he also opened DoubleClick's European Ventures in the UK
and Scandinavia. John also was the Director of International Marketing and
Operations where he built and managed DoubleClick's second International
business unit, selling the DART advertising management service with a main
focus on Europe. Prior to DoubleClick, John was Director of Product
Marketing at Firefly Network. John holds a BA from Cambridge University,
and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
Todd
J. Kluger
Director Marketing/Brand Development
Todd brings ten years of marketing and communications experience
to his role of building strategic marketing efforts: global
branding, product marketing, advertising & public relations.
Most recently, Todd was the global brand manager in corporate
marketing at Seattle-based Starbucks Coffee Company, the
world's largest and most influential specialty coffee brand.
He was a cross-functional team leader charged with building,
planning, coordinating and monitoring the Starbucks family
of brands. Todd is also the former owner & principal in
a Seattle based Film & Video Production Company specializing
in High-Definition applications. Todd holds a BA from Washington
State University and has studied New Communication Technologies
at Nihon Daigaku (Japan University) in Tokyo.
Joanne
Purdy
Director Business Development
Joanne
has ten years of technical experience in the software industry.
She began her career at Andersen Consulting in Chicago helping
manufacturing facilities assess and implement systems to
support their MRP needs. Later, she joined Gensym Corporation
where she worked with clients to prototype manufacturing
processes in a real-time expert system called G2. In 1996,
Joanne received a MA in Computer Science from Boston University.
After graduation, she worked as a consultant automating
front and back-end testing for large scale Web sites. In
1998, when Firefly Network was acquired by Microsoft, she
moved to Seattle to manage the client test effort on Microsoft
Passport. Joanne holds a BS in Mechanical Engineering from
Purdue University.
