Cool Person of the Day

With smartphone technology and mobile computing technology constantly changing, it can be exceptionally difficult for a communications business to remain competitive.  By the very nature of discovery, if your business is not the first to market with a product or technological advance, you end up following someone else.  In the tech sector there are few things worse than being a follower and in the mobile phone carrier industry, that is especially true.  So, when Sprint-Nextel and Verizon developed 4G networks for their customers, they left the other telecommunications companies in the dust.  That, however, was not enough to stop Neville Ray.

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Sometimes, an individual’s association with a company can make all the difference in establishing a business venture.  John F. Kennedy Jr.’s decision to make a political magazine at a time when the market was pretty much strangled with political print magazines did not stop him from making George a success.  In a similar way, one of the new tech sector startups benefits greatly from the celebrity of one of the members of its management team.  Numecent is an emerging Cloudpaging company and it would be just another Internet startup if it was not for Hildy Shandell.

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There are few computer peripherals as important to PC users as the keyboard.  For sure, the computer mouse would be a close second, but the keyboard is still the vital interface peripheral for those who continue to use personal computers.  There is one name in the computer peripherals market that is virtually synonymous with high quality keyboards and computer mice: Logitech.  At the head of Logitech is Guerrino De Luca!

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Nokia has slowly been stopping its free-fall.  At one point, Nokia absolutely dominated the mobile phone market and the success of the company actually boosted the national economy of Finland significantly.  In recent years, though, Nokia had not adequately predicted the meteoric rise of the smartphone and the need to diversify their product line.  Under Stephen Elop, Nokia is diversifying and making other strategic decisions designed to keep Nokia alive in the very competitive mobile computing marketplace.  But all of Elop’s efforts would be for naught if it were not for the skills and abilities of Jerri DeVard.

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Changing the face of shopping on the Internet is not as easy an idea to execute as it is to conceive.  There are many different models for trying to lure websurfers into shopping, though the prevailing wisdom is one must have a site or interface that is rich with images.  Shopping through pictures you find on the Internet is the basic idea behind sites like Shopalong and Luminate.  Making it possible for you to buy what you see in pictures online is the job of the engineers at Luminate.  Directing them and making Luminate successful is Troy Chevalier.

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When Meg Whitman was elected by Hewlett-Packard’s Board of Directors to be the new CEO of HP, the story was all about Meg Whitman, not about how a woman was taking the reins of a powerful technology company. The media became uncharacteristically gender-blind with Meg Whitman and that is promising for the future of business and women in the tech sector. It is also not a surprise in that Hewlett-Packard had been managed by a woman before. That woman was Catherine A. Lesjak.

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There are few sectors of business where the glass ceiling is more evident than the technology sector.  For whatever reason, women in executive level and high management positions are almost completely absent from the ranks of the tech sector.  Even as some companies in the tech sector work to change the disappointing way women are excluded from top positions, the companies that lead the charge of businesses that have women on their executive management team are always looking to put the best person in the available position.  For Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile U.S.A., that meant hiring Claudia Nemat.

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The social network landscape continues to change.  With Facebook going public and changing their privacy policies and the rise of Google+, the media would almost have you forget there are any other social networks on the Internet!  Despite that perception, there are several other Internet social networks and many of them have benefits and intriguing aspects that the major social networks lack.  The differences in how the Internet social networks look, feel and operate are the result of each networks engineering department.  For Yammer, Kris Gale is the engineer in charge.

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Every great idea in the tech sector requires good people to execute.  No matter how clever or constructive a concept is, without the right technical people to execute the plan, a business or ambitious idea will fail.  So when a number of influential individuals in finance, education and business began departing their lucrative careers to form the Khan Academy, some of their most important hiring choices involved staffing their technical support positions.  That made Marcia Lee an important hire for the Khan Academy.

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While the computer mouse is a pretty indispensible peripheral for computer users, with so many different types of computer mice on the market, it is hard for many companies to market a sophisticated computer mouse.  As the price of the basic computer mouse and even the basic optical mouse with scrollwheel has dropped, the higher end computer mouse companies have had to work much harder to sell users on their more expensive computer mice.  When Movea acquired Gyration, the maker of the Air Mouse line of premium computer mice, it seemed like continuing the Air Mouse line might be unprofitable.  But Bryan Hoadley has seamlessly integrated Gyration into the Movea family.

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