Cool Person of the Day

Sometimes, the very best thing for a technology company is an outsider who understands the products and goals of the company, without necessarily understanding all of the intricacies of the business.  It takes a fairly daring company to grant a seat on the Board of Directors to an individual who has vision, but not business experience.  In the case of Sigma-Aldrich, one of the world’s leading scientific equipment manufacturers, the company took a calculated risk when it hired Rebecca M. Bergman directly to the Board.

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Because of how fast the technology sector adapts and changes, sometimes it is hard to remember how significant some of the overnight successes for companies truly were.  After all, one year the hot product is an iPad, the next year it is an Amazon Kindle Fire, the next year, the market explodes for an entirely different product.  Because the attention span of consumers is so short, you might have forgotten one of the most significant product releases in the last decade.  There have been sixty million of them sold since 2004.  Give up?  It’s the TomTom GPS navigation system.  The founder and CEO of TomTom is Harold Goddijn and he is one of the coolest businessmen around.

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There are few phrases less applicable in the tech sector than “if a product is good, it will pretty much sell itself.”  If that were the case, the Microsoft Zune would have been phenomenally more successful and Apple would not even be considering a mini-iPad.  Instead, without great marketing, a good product can get buried by a competitor.  Conversely, with a crack marketing team, an unimpressive product can appear so vital to consumers that it will sell a million units.  So, in these times when energy efficiency is increasingly important and technology manufacturers scramble to build better batteries, a Vice President of Marketing for an alternative energy company might seem unnecessary.  Nothing could be further for the truth at Tremont Electric, though.  That is why Tremont Electric is thrilled to have Jill LeMieux.

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In a world with rapidly changing technology, it is rare when one encounters a truly good idea anymore.  Indeed, many emerging technologies simply seek to improve upon already existing devices or technology.  So, when FXI Technologies virtually reinvented the computer with the Cotton Candy 3” computer device, it was newsworthy.  The brain behind Cotton Candy and FXI Technologies is Borgar Ljosland.

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For those who might not have heard of it yet, there is a social network challenging Facebook for supremacy on the Internet.  It’s not Google+, either!  The social network is called Diaspora and it is an open-source alternative to Facebook that was founded on the belief that users ought to control their information and social network experience.  Diaspora is a good idea that has been plagued by problems, not the least of which are a lack of name recognition (outside the hacker community) and the suicide last November of one of the company’s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy.  Despite the setbacks, Diaspora is poised to break out into popular culture.  If it does, it will no doubt be in part because of Rosanna Yau.

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There are a number of ways to try to make money off the Internet.  However, the study of analytics is becoming a big business for those who want to generate revenue from their websites.  Analytics is a study of both website content and visitor traffic patterns.  The big analytic programs, like Google analytics and Gnip, rely upon vast amounts of data and trends to provide the content providers of websites with the tools they need to monetize their site most effectively.  One of the emerging analytics sites on the Internet is Yieldbot.  The daunting task of creating their analytical tools falls to Soren Macbeth.

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Any number of good ideas will fail when you do not have the right people in place to execute them.  As online advertising becomes increasingly competitive, Spongecell CEO Ben Kartzman knew that in order to compete with giants like Amazon and Google’s Adsense, he needed a staff that was both creative and could execute complex ideas.  For the computer proficiency Spongecell needed to compete in a very tight market, Kartzman turned to Blythe Dunham!

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There are a number of emerging online and mobile phone payment companies. No longer is the whole of the Internet beholden to PayPal for fast, secure, on-line payments. In addition to emerging mobile phone payment companies Square and Dwolla, there is Boku. If you haven’t heard of Boku, yet, that is not a surprise; it is still fairly new. But David Yoo is determined to make Boku a household name!

David Yoo is the Senior Vice President of Strategy, Product and Marketing for Boku. In that role, David Yoo is raising brand recognition and spending a great deal of time informing potential customers about the services that Boku offers. As Boku breaks into the rapidly expanding online and mobile payment market, it is David Yoo’s job to help Boku rise above the pack. So far, Yoo’s efforts have helped to net more investment from Silicon Valley investors and the launch of a multimedia advertising campaign.

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It is absolutely astonishing to see how fast a social network can rise on the Internet.  It seems like Internet social networks fall much, much slower than they rise – one need only look at the slow fading of MySpace to recall how they might linger – but when a new social network is a hit, it can come out of nowhere.  That is the story of Pinterest.  Pinterest may not be a household name yet, but the little social network had about one third the traffic of Twitter in January 2012, making it a sudden force in the social network market.  With such a sudden demand for its service, Pinterest has a great reliance on Aubrey Obata Kendall.

Aubrey Obata Kendall is the chief recruiter for Pinterest.  Since November of 2011, Kendall has been staffing up Pinterest in order to help the small company grow to meet the current and forthcoming demand for their services.  Because Pinterest is currently so small, the recruiting position is especially important to the company.  Aubrey Obata Kendall’s judgment on staff may well affect the course of the entire company, so the reliance Pinterest has on her is actually quite high.

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In the quest to make digital music a viable business endeavor instead of just a cool idea, there have been many businesses and websites that have already come and gone.  While digital music pirating has been a huge issue for most of the services that have failed, rapidly changing hardware has been a serious issue as well.  One quarter, the dominant digital music device is an MP3 player, the next it is a smartphone!  Failure to adapt the digital music service to the new technologies has sunk some of the digital music services distributing digital music files over the Internet.  Spotify is deeply invested in making sure that does not happen.  For that, they have Oskar Stal!

Oskar Stal is the Chief Technology Officer of digital music distributor Spotify.  As Spotify developed as a website, but prepared to take its service international, the company sought a CTO who had extensive experience with mobile operating systems.  Without a CTO who knew the ins and outs of various mobile platforms, Spotify could not take their business to the next level.  Having been employed at mBlox, a company deeply invested in mobile transactions and the technical interactions between mobile platforms, Oskar Stal rose to the top of Spotify’s list of desirable candidates for the position.

Oskar Stal’s resume is more extensive than simply working for mBlox, though spending eight years as the Director of Development in the technical department at that company was the weightiest factor in Spotify hiring him.  Fortunately for Spotify, Stal was exceptionally interested in the position; he was already impressed by how much Spotify had accomplished without someone as experienced at the top of their development branch!

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