Team
Nikos Iatropoulos, Co-Founder & CEO
Nikos is responsible for building the company's world class semantic search, aggregation and content segmentation business by leveraging Lingospot's patented natural language processing technologies to deliver real value for online publishers, networks and brands globally. Nikos has been actively involved in the software and new media industries for the last 18 years. Prior to Lingospot, he launched several software and new media ventures. He was a founder and CEO of Upstream, one of the top five mobile marketing companies worldwide, with 2007 revenues of over $36 Million. Nikos was also the co-founder and COO of Snack TV, led the global launch of RCS Mobile (acquired by Clear Channel), and has advised several new media companies including Out There Media, NCI Mobility (acquired by In-Touch) and Hi-Tide Media. Nikos has also been an investment banker for Credit Suisse and a management consultant for Booz Allen Hamilton. He holds a BS in Computer Science from Columbia University and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
Dr. Gerald Chao, Co-Founder & CTO
Gerald leads the development and innovation of the company's semantic search and natural language processing technologies. Gerald has been driving the development the core natural language processing technology of Lingospot for the last eight years. He has published several papers on natural language algorithms and has four patents pending and one granted on natural language processing and search technologies. Prior to founding Lingospot, Gerald served as a Sr. Programmer at WebSciences International and as a programmer at IBM. Gerald holds a MS in Computer Science and a PhD in statistical natural language processing, both from UCLA.
Jose daVeiga, SVP Sales & Business Development, Americas
Jose is responsible for overseeing Lingospot's direct sale efforts in North and South America. Jose has over 12 years experience in the media and technology industries. Prior to joining Lingospot, he was the founder and CEO of KlickSports, a provider of branded mobile sports games, where he raised $1.2M in a Series A funding round and crafted business partnerships with, among others, the FOX Sports Network, Google, AT&T;, Kentucky Fried Chicken and the Redskins. Prior to KlickSports, he was Sr. Product Manager at Adconion Media Group, the largest independent audience and content network in the world. Jose has also held senior level positions with Convolution, Strategic Data Corp (acquired by Fox Interactive Media) and Path Communications and has led or participated in projects for LA Times/Tribune, UCLA, NBCi, Lycos, iWin and CarsDirect.com, among others. Jose holds a PhD and M.A. in Architecture Technology and a MArc II in Architecture, all from UCLA.
Dino Joannides, SVP Sales & Business Development, EMEA
Dino is responsible for overseeing Lingospot's direct sale efforts in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Dino has over 17 years international sales, marketing and general management experience with pre-IPO and larger public companies. Most recently Dino served as the VP Global Sales and Business Development for weComm. Prior to that he undertook Business Development at Picsel Technologies, responsible for driving the go-to-market strategy and execution for a new mobile content solutions portfolio. He was also a co-founder, COO and later CEO of Upstream, a pioneer in mobile media and marketing. Dino has also held a number of non-executive, consulting and full-time sales and marketing roles with companies including Activemedia Technologies, Mitel Corporation, MCI, Signalsoft Corporation, Bristol York and VoIP-X. Dino holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science from Hull University, UK and was a recipient of a 3 year post graduate scholarship from the ESRC to undertake research in Industrial and Technology Policy based in Paris, France.
Steve Wedig, Software Architect
Steve is responsible for software modeling and managing codebase complexity. Prior to joining Lingospot, Steve held technical and research positions at Yahoo! Research Labs, Sandia National Laboratories, and NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. His interests include artificial intelligence, web-mining, data modeling, and programming language design. Steve has published papers in data mining, personalized search, and cryptography. He holds a Bachelors of Science (cum laude) from Santa Clara University and a Master of Science from UCLA, both in Computer Science. He is currently a PhD candidate at UCLA (on leave).
Dan Soudek, Lead Software Engineer
Dan is responsible for product development and maintaining quality of service. Prior to joining Lingospot, Dan was a software developer on the DomainMatch team, part of Yahoo! Search Marketing. Among his most recent projects was the development of the international capabilities of the DomainMatch product by better targeting advertisements from 23 markets globally using heuristics. Dan has considerable hands-on expertise in developing and supporting large-scale web services. Dan holds a Bachelors in Computer Science from the California Institute of Technology and is the recipient of a Microsoft scholarship.
Shawn Grant, Sr. Software Engineer
Shawn is responsible for coding on the new Lingospot platform. Prior to Lingospot, Shawn was a Senior Developer at Mahalo.com, a top 150 trafficked website, where he rewrote the critical portion of the web application dealing with user account balances and the calculation and display of revenue sharing from Google Adsense. Prior to Mahalo, Shawn spent nine years at Daticon/EED where he focused on LAMP development using the Python programming language, Apache web server, and MySQL relational database structures as the core environment for DolphinSearch application development. Shawn holds a M. Sc. and B. Sc. in Computer Science and a B.E. in Engineering Physics, all from the University of Saskatchewan in Canada.
