Experienced in building new companies, products and services. Founded two Saas start-ups. Identified four B2B service opportunities for Columbia Ventures Corp. Managed P&L for e-commerce and Internet start-up companies. Commercialized raw technology for Lucent’s Bell Labs resulting in 2 spin-out companies.
Education includes finance and information systems MBA from NYU Stern School of Business, Electrical Engineering (with certificate in Engineering Physics) BSE from Princeton University.
Inventor of software-as-a-service startup providing automation and remote access tools for data recovery, forensics and malware removal. Used by IT professionals to access remote computers that cannot (or should not) be started normally. Launched (beta) marketplace for the automated installation and configuration of open-source software to remote systems (see FindFollow for example). Patented innovations underlying the SOFIns platform (Patent US 8346897)
Product Manager: Observed needs of technicians delivering, and consumers seeking, computer support services. Defined and prioritized requirements. Employed customer development process to improve and expand feature set. Operated as the scrum product owner.
Business Analyst: Wrote initial business plan and maintained it using Business Modeling Canvas approach. Identified and pursued partnerships with data recovery, forensics and support organizations. Performed competitor analysis. Crafted first marketing documents. Presented product at conferences.
Early Sales Manager: Marketed through LinkedIn groups to recruit first 10 customers. Used “Sales Advantage” training to prospect for new customers. Increased customer base to 27 tech support firms.
Software Development Team Member: Assembled and led a distributed team of 6 software developers in Ukraine, Poland and Russia. Operated team as the scrum master.
Development Operations Manager: Installed software development tools including Thoughtworks Mingle project planning (later Redmine), Subversion code repository (some Github), Enterprise Architect for UML designs, DokuWiki for online documentation, Hudson/Jenkins for continuous integration, custom Python and Bash scripts for continuous deployment, Selenium Grid for automated regression testing and Puppet to maintain system configurations. Used Proxmox for internal cloud computing infrastructure.
Identified new business opportunities and deployed new services for the subsidiaries of Columbia Ventures Corporation, a private investment company that owns and operates telecommunications, submarine network and consumer triple-play firms. Successfully identified market opportunities, gathered requirements, defined strategies, assembled resources and led initial launch of new services.
Equipment for Services business strategy utilizing an Asterisk IP PBX open source phone systems to allow a business VoIP provider to compete in an uncontested market instead of head-on with a much larger incumbent
WiFi VoIP on emerging dual-mode (GSM/WiFi) handsets to allows a landline carrier to compete against mobile operators by offering business phone services integrated with mobile handsets
Adempiere Open Source ERP system to automate inventory management, sales order processing and telecom circuit provisioning to decrease customer setup times
SIP SER-router trunking to allow an IPTV provider to deliver Vonage-like services to subscribers
Hosted IPTV Head End for Rural Carriers that combined service offering of three CVC operating companies to offer a new service to an existing customer base
Hana Micron is a Samsung Electronics spin-off company manufacturing solid-state memory devices such as USB Flash Drives.
Started Memina operations to market and sell premium USB Flash Drives. P&L responsibility for product design, online retail store operations, magazine advertising campaign and marketing
Started TuneFlash operations to market and sell MP3 music compilations on USB Flash Drives. Created functional design of autolaunch application and hired software development group for coding. Launched first product with Magnatune.
Designed “triple play” set top boxes that deliver video, telephony and broadband services to residential customers. Negotiated product licensing with consumer electronics manufacturers
Founded and operated a service company that combined salesforce automation tools with a hosted phone system to allow sales organizations, law firms and consultancies to automatically capture and process communication events with their clients:
Launched market trial with NYC-based law firms
Led panel discussion about law firm automation tools at LegalTech tradeshow
Webley was a pioneer of SIP-based Unified Communications services to small and medium businesses and the first company to offer a voice-activated hosted PBX to mobile professionals.
Led the commercialization efforts of the VoIP industry’s first voice-activated, enhanced services platform. Identified markets for the technology and wrote the business plan to market the platform to voice ASPs
Initiated and negotiated all business development partnerships with Intel (Dialogic), Sun Microsystems, NMS Communications, Motorola. Negotiated licensing of SIP user agents, VoiceXML browsers and speech-recognition toolkits. Negotiated “Call Forwarding” service from eVoice. Initiated and led the acquisition of BuzMe, one of the first Internet voice mail service providers
Networked with Bell Labs engineers and scientists to identify technologies that may be commercialized and spun-out of Lucent as startup ventures. Worked on over 15 commercialization projects, including:
MPEG-4 video capture and analysis system (originally called Puppeteering) that eventually spun out as Face2Face Animation and provided services and technology for game developers
Internet mapping system (originally called Peacock Maps and part of the Internet Mapping Project) that eventually spun out as Lumeta and provides network security tools
Psychoacoustic audio that delivered perception of surround-sound audio using only two speakers
This was my first venture. I had been studying for a Ph.D. in semiconductor physics, was having a difficult time and decided to take a year off. During this year off, I was introduced to the directors of Ukrainian-based aluminum metals companies. They complained about difficulty reaching their business partners in New York. I proposed an INMARSAT satellite earth station, they accepted and I spent the next four years traveling throughout Ukraine and Guinea West Africa installing and servicing telecom systems.
Negotiated and obtained a license from Trimble Navigation to sell and support GMDSS navigation and communication systems as I expanded the initial customer base to include bulk-shipping companies
The demand for satellite telephony declined in 1995 because fiber optic networks were being installed throughout the former USSR. I attempted to transition the business to software and hardware outsourced design and development services and obtained partnerships with several former-military development firms. I was unable to find customers for these services, however. Instead of returning for my Ph.D. in physics, I went for an MBA in finance and information systems at NYU.
United States 8,346,897 A method and system for software deployment or maintenance where procedures for software installation or maintenance are defined by a skilled individual; site-specific or confidential information is separated from operating system native commands; parameterized commands referencing a hierarchy of variables are acquired by another individual; site-specific or confidential information of the other individual is combined with parameterized commands; new operating system native commands are generated; and, the new operating system native commands are execute on a computing system to reproduce the procedures for software installation or maintenance originally defined by the skilled individual.
The software deployment or maintenance procedures originally defined by the skilled individual may be applied to any number of computing systems maintained by any number of other individuals without the skilled individual's further involvement in the process. The site-specific or confidential information belonging to the other individuals is not shared with the skilled individual.
United States 7,539,086
The system is designed to interface with external devices and services, to transcribe audio that may be stored elsewhere such as a wireless phone'voice mail, or occurring between two or more parties such as a conference call. An audio stream is separated into many audio shreds, each of which has duration of only a few seconds and cannot reveal the context of the conversation. A workforce of geographically distributed transcription agents who transcribe the audio shreds is able to generate transcription in real time, with many agents working in parallel on a single conversation. No one agent (or group of agents) receives a sufficient number of audio shreds to reconstruct the context of any conversation. The use of human transcribers allows the system to overcome limitations typical of computer-based speech recognition and permits accurate transcription of general-quality speech even in acoustically hostile environments.
United States 6,816,834
A method, comprising the steps of receiving an audio stream, filtering the audio stream to separate identifiable words in the audio stream from unidentifiable words, creating a word text file for the identifiable words and storing the word text file in a database, the word text file including word indexing information. Creating audio segments from the audio stream, the audio segments including portions of the audio stream having unidentifiable words, creating audio shreds from the audio segments, the audio shreds including audio shred indexing information to identify each of the audio shreds and storing the audio shred indexing information in the database. Mixing the audio shreds with other audio shreds from other audio streams, delivering the audio shreds to a plurality of transcribers, transcribing each of the audio shreds into a corresponding audio shred text file, the audio shred text file including the audio shred indexing information corresponding to the audio shred from which the audio shred text file was created and reassembling the audio shred text files and the word text files into a conversation text file corresponding to the audio stream.
