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Strands Team

Strands was conceived by Francisco J. Martin in 2003 when he was a visiting researcher at Oregon State University. Francisco started Strands in parallel in Bellaterra (Barcelona) and Corvallis (Oregon). In Bellaterra, Strands was founded as a spin-off of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research where Francisco conducted his Ph.D. research and was funded by Sequel Research, SL. In Oregon, Francisco teamed up early on with Professor Thomas G. Dietterich, Jalal Haddad, John Herlocker, Matt McLaughlin, and Marc Torrens to found and fund the company.

Dr. Francisco J Martin

Dr. Francisco J. Martin

Founder and Chief Executive Officer

Francisco J Martin is a scientist, entrepreneur and specialist in artificial cognitive systems. He is the founder and former CEO of the AI firm iSOCO-Intelligent Software Components, SA. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science with highest honors from Technical University of Catalonia.
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His main research and entrepreneurial interest lies in the broad areas of distributed systems, machine learning, software engineering, and security. He is primarily devoted to the development of artificial cognitive systems and large-scale distributed systems that are highly autonomous and reliable. He is also concerned with the effective transfer of technology in today's emerging markets.

From 1992 to 1994, Martin was a research scholar for the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science (MEC) at the Information Systems and Computing Department (DSIC) of the Technical University of Valencia (UPV).

In 1995, while finishing his five-year degree in computer science at the Computer Science Faculty (FIV) of the Technical University of Valencia (UPV), the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) awarded Martin a young investigator grant ("beca de la bicicleta") to study at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute (IIIA-CSIC).

During the fall of 1996, Martin was a research scholar at the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. There he developed Noostoo, a representation language that demonstrated both that Youtoo was a useful tool to develop artificial intelligence applications, such as Noos, and that Common Lisp applications could be translated relatively easily into EuLisp.

From 1996 to 1999, Martin received a pre-doctoral grant from the Catalan Government (DGR-CIRIT), and he worked on his Ph.D. thesis at the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute. His doctoral research was supervised by Dr. Enric Plaza. This was primarily concerned with distributed machine learning and problem-solving integrated techniques. He focused on the development of decentralized case-based reasoning agents. He implemented Plural Noos, a platform for knowledge and experience reuse among peer agents. Martin was also an active member of the Fishmarket project. He developed its first prototype and contributed a number of papers and software articles: conversation protocols, interagents, tournaments, and others.

In 1999, nearing completion of his Ph.D., Martin founded iSOCO-Intelligent Software Components, SA, which was the first spin-off of the IIIA-CSIC. iSOCO has been specializing in developing business solutions that take full advantage of internet technology. iSOCO was awarded several prizes. These included the best R & D enterprise of 2003 by the Internet Global Congress, and the 2003 first prize in the Agent Technology Competition, selected by Agentcities. iSOCO currently employs around 100 people and has offices in Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia.

After four years of guiding iSOCO as President & CEO, he decided to step down, taking a sabbatical leave in September of 2002. He went back to the IIIA-CSIC and finished his Ph.D. in case-based sequence analysis.

In 2003, Martin moved to Corvallis, Oregon. There he worked at the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) at Oregon State University (OSU) with Professor Thomas Dietterich. With Prof. Dietterich he pursued methods for autonomous problem determination and distributed diagnosis in networked systems.

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Strands Finance & Legal

David Silverman

David Silverman

Vice President, Legal

David Silverman specializes in licensing, intellectual property and internet law, but his interests also include antitrust and constitutional law. Before joining Strands, David practiced in the Technology and Intellectual Property group at Stoel Rives LLP. He received the JD from Stanford Law School and also holds a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.
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He has been practicing law in Oregon since 2001. He was named an Oregon Super Lawyers "Rising Star" for 2008 by Law & Politics magazine. David currently serves as chair of the Executive Committee of the Oregon State Bar's Section on Antitrust and Trade Regulation, as well as on the Lawyers Committee for the ACLU of Oregon.


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Strands People Operations

Mary Beth Altmann Hughes, SPHR

Mary Beth Altmann Hughes, SPHR

People Operations Director

Mary Beth is a seasoned HR Professional with senior management experience in government, high-tech, manufacturing and medical device industries. She has worked for non-profit, public and private organizations across America.
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Prior to Strands, Mary Beth was the Human Resources Director for ATS North American Operations for four years. During her tenure at ATS, Mary Beth aligned Human Resource practices across the United States and streamlined HR policies and procedures to support the overall business plan of the company.

Mary Beth received her Bachelor of Arts in History and Secondary Education from Lewis University and her Masters of Science in Human Resources Management from Troy State University. In addition, Mary Beth earned the Senior Professional Human Resources (SPHR) designation from the Society for Human Resources Management.


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Juli Garcia

Juli Garcia

People Operations Manager (EU)

Juli is a HR Professional experienced in Software Development companies. He worked for several years as a Soft Engineer in high-tech projects. He obtained a degree in Informatics Engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia in 1995. He received a Master in HR Direction and Organizational Consultancy (2-year) from Barcelona University (UB) in 2003.
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Prior to Strands, from 2005 to 2008, Juli was managing the new-created Technical Development Unit (UDT-IA) of Artificial Research Institute (IIIA) belonging to Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) during three years. UDT-IA mission is to find solutions to complex problems using modern artificial intelligence techniques. He worked for DOC6 (2003-2004) and Nexe (2004-2005) as a consultant.

Juli was also involved in the early days of iSOCO-Intelligent Software Components, SA, first as a software engineer (1999 - 2000) and lately as a Human Resources Director (2000 - 2002). iSOCO-Intelligent Software Components, SA was the first spin-off of the IIIA-CSIC. iSOCO has been specializing in developing business solutions that take full advantage of internet technology.

In summer 1995 Spanish Association for International Cooperation and Development awarded Juli with a cooperation grant ("Intercampus") to develop operating systems in University of EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia.

Juli was Erasmus student at The University of Bath in the United Kingdom from 1995 to 1996

Juli is a has always being involved in new groups or start-up companies that requires hard-work and extra-effort to make things happen.


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Strands Recommender

Jesús Pindado

Jesús Pindado

Vice President, Business Solutions

Jesus brings a strong international business development background working with Europe, Asia, and North America. He adds over 10 years of hands-on engineering, business development, and management expertise in the technology arena.
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During the last 7 years he has held various key operational roles in Global Locate, a fabless GPS semiconductor and Location Based Services supplier for wireless and consumer electronics applications that was recently acquired by Broadcom. With a recent focus on sales, product marketing, and business development strategy, he has developed a deep understanding of the competitive landscape around technology, services, and business models across the wireless value chain.

Earlier in his career he worked in aerospace engineering for Orbital Sciences Corporation, developing and testing novel avionics systems for unmanned reusable launch vehicles.

Jesús has a B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan.


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R. Scott Doan

R. Scott Doan

Vice President, Enterprise Sales

Scott is a veteran executive of early stage companies with deep experience in enterprise sales, business development and channel sales.
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Prior to joining the team at Strands in January 2008, Scott was Vice-President, Global Sales at Total Training, a leading on-demand video software training company. Before that he was Regional Vice President at Books24x7, a Skillsoft company. During his six year tenure at the company, he oversaw 37%+ annual revenue growth within his business unit, while managing to 21 straight quarters of profitability. Working with companies like Nike, Intel, WaMU, EDS, Disney, Symantec, Amgen, T-Mobile and Yahoo!, Scott provided the leadership necessary to successfully deploy enterprise-level digital learning, web-based collaboration, training and reference content solutions.

From 1998 to 2001, Scott was Vice President, Sales and Publishing at netLibrary, a pioneer in the DRM and content management services market. As an original member of the sales management team, he structured the build out of the domestic and international sales organization and lead the start up to record revenues. He helped facilitate their acquisition by the Online Computer Library Center, a nonprofit organization providing LMS, reference, resource sharing, and preservation services to libraries worldwide. From 1995 to 1998, Scott served as Senior Director, Business Development for Dataware Technologies, whose publishing service groups were acquired by Information Handling Services (IHS).

Prior to 1995, Scott worked as sales executive for early stage technology firms in the Northwest, where he developed direct sales opportunities in the US and established sales channels throughout APAC - including co-founding a software distribution firm based in Portland.

Scott holds a B.S. in Business Communications from Oregon State University.


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Trevor Legwinski

Trevor Legwinski

Business Development Manager

Skilled in product marketing and consumer behavior. His creativity, business sense and ingenuity, is fueling Strands new innovative product partyStrands. Received his MBA from Oregon State University.
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Trevor is a creative thinker with a keen foresight into consumer behavior. He received his MBA at Oregon State University with an emphasis in entrepreneurship and marketing and his BBA at St. Norbert college, where he studied overseas in Australia at Bond University honing his skills in marketing and consumer behavior. He has worked on projects ranging from market trend analysis and business plan writing to an extensive marketing plan for Oregon Coast Community College. His foresight into consumer behavior and market trends make him a perfect fit for Strands new and innovative product partyStrands, which is aimed to change the way world parties.


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Dr.-Ing Mehmet Göker

Dr.-Ing Mehmet Goker

Vice President of Recommender Technologies

Dr.-Ing Mehmet H. Göker joined Strands as the Vice President of Recommender Technologies in November 2009. He comes to Strands as a highly experienced Research and Development leader with an extensive track record of leveraging advanced research and technology to implement robust, innovative and intelligent real-world information systems and analytics tools.
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He is a widely recognized and published expert in Intelligent Application Development and the author of more than 30 scientific articles in peer reviewed journals and conferences, three books, 15 edited proceedings and 3 special issues of the AI-Magazine. He has been the chair and co-chair of several conferences such as IAAI and ECCBR, many workshops and symposia and has given tutorials at conferences such as IJCAI and the German KI-Tagung.

Prior to joining Strands, Dr. Göker was Research Director at PricewaterhouseCoopers' Center for Advanced Research where he led a group of researchers, developers, usability and subject matter experts to develop advanced tools and technologies that solve previously unsolvable practice problems and give PwC a major competitive advantage. His projects included Project Insight (a Recommender System which determines and predicts issues companies are facing by mining internal and external data sources and allows PwC to offer services proactively) and the Connection Machine (an Expertise Locator that helps PwC partners and staff solve problems by connecting people).

Before joining PwC, Dr. Göker was the Vice President of Professional Services at Kaidara where he and his team delivered Kaidara’s Case-Based solutions for Knowledge Management, technical self-service and e-commerce to Fortune 500 clients.

Prior to Kaidara, Dr. Göker was a senior research scientist at DaimlerChrysler's Research and Technology Center in Palo Alto, California (Adaptive Systems Group, Head: Prof. Pat Langley) and in Ulm, Germany (Data Mining Group, Head: Prof. Gholamrheza Nakhaeizadeh) where he designed and developed intelligent systems to provide personalized in-car services (user adaptive recommendations), to perform proactive diagnosis and maintenance of vehicles and to support Help Desk Operators with diagnostic knowledge.

He holds a Dr.-Ing in Mechanical Engineering (Engineering Design Methodology) from the University of Darmstadt, a M.S.E. in Aerospace Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, an M.Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Bogazici University in Istanbul and a B.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering from the Istanbul Technical University.


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Dr. Rick D. Hangartner

Dr. Rick D. Hangartner

Chief Scientist

Engineering and Computer Scientist specializing in AI, signal processing, and stochastic processes. Nearly 30 years experience developing computing hardware and software in the aerospace, data communications, transportation, and supercomputing industries. Ph.D. Computer Science from Oregon State University.
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Dr. Rick D. Hangartner has nearly 30 years experience developing computing hardware and software in the aerospace, data communications, heavy-trucking, and supercomputing industries. Prior to joining Strands, he worked for seven years at Cray, Inc. developing high performance computing hardware and software.

Dr. Hangartner has taught classes in digital signal processing, computer organization, computer programming, and symbolic logic at the University of South Florida, Portland State University, and Oregon State University. He holds two U. S. patents, and has published several papers in signal processing and computing.

Dr. Hangartner is a member of Sigma Xi, IEEE, and ACM.

Dr. Hangartner attended Harvard University in 1975 and 1976, earned his B.A. in Mathematics in 1982 and his M.S. in Engineering Science in 1984 from the University of South Florida, and his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994 from Oregon State University.


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Dr. Luz Martín

Dr. Luz Martín

Recommendation Analyst

Dr. Luz Martín joined the Strands team as Recommendation Analysts, evaluating and refining recommender systems both in terms of user experience and technology. She works closely with the Strands Business Services team in Madrid.
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Dr. Martin started her carreer as researcher in the field of Cosmology and Astrophysics in the Theoretical Physics Department at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid (UAM). She specialized in the computation of theoretical models of formation and evolution of dwarf galaxies with star formation and received her PhD degree in Physics in May, 2009. During her time at the UAM, she worked as assistant professor at the Theoretical Physics Department and as manager of the Astronomical Observatory. She actively participated in national and international scientific conferences and has been a member of the organizing committees of various national workshops, conferences and exhibitions. She is still part of the research staff of UAM in various funded science projects, and continues to publish articles on this field in scientific journals.

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moneyStrands

Atakan Cetinsoy

Atakan Cetinsoy

Vice President, Personal Finance

Recently Atakan served 5 years with Apple Computer where he led the first fully personalized application of music recommendations on the iTunes Music Store serving millions of users in 21 countries. MBA from The University of Georgia.
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Atakan has more than 10 years of customer and product marketing experience with some of the most admired global brands in the computer hardware and software, Internet/e-Commerce and transportation industries.

Most recently Atakan served 5 years with Apple Computer, where he led the effort to model customer value as driven by the adoption of digital media services offered through the market leading iTunes Music Store platform covering both desktop and mobile use cases. His ability to recognize emerging consumer trends in this fast growing segment of the media market led to the first fully personalized application of music recommendations on the iTunes platform serving millions of users in 21 countries. Prior to iTunes Music Store, Atakan spent 3 years developing the global enterprise marketing infrastructure and processes for Apple's US$1 billion plus online direct sales channel.

Before joining Apple in 2001, Atakan was part of Yahoo!'s loyalty marketing team crafting online methods to increase user retention while leveraging key marketing partnerships with consumer brands to bring more value to the 6 million plus member base.

Atakan also has tenure with FedEx during which he managed the company's award winning online near real time package tracking services and oversaw the effort to launch vertical applications in the same category. As part of FedEx Corporate Marketing team his work fueled the repositioning of the marketing strategies for the hotly contested multi-modal, dual carrier shipping segment.

Atakan holds a B.S. degree in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Bogazici University in Istanbul and an M.B.A. from The University of Georgia as a fully sponsored International Student scholar of the Terry College of Business.


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Alla Oks

Alla Oks

Marketing Manager

Alla Oks is a seasoned Marketing Professional with over 12 years of product marketing and marketing communication experience with highly respected software companies. Originally from Ukraine, Alla holds a B.S. and M.S. degree in Biochemistry with highest honors from Melitopol State University.
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In addition, she has completed several professional certification programs including Marketing and Project management at UC Berkeley and currently is pursuing an M.B.A. Prior to joining Strands, Alla was a Sr. Marketing Manager at OEA International, a leading EDA software company, where she has driven number of highly successful product launches and created numerous of marketing programs that helped to establish leadership position for the company across semiconductor industry. Her background includes extensive experience in product marketing, marketing communications, market analysis, lead generation programs and marketing events management.


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Ivan Tarradellas

Ivan Tarradellas

Tech Lead

Ivan joined Strands in July‘2008 and has been working for different projects at the Strands Personal Finance unit. He has a strong background in software engineering. He is a problem solving specialist and a pragmatic programmer with more than 11 years of experience.
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He was born in Barcelona, began working as a software developer in 1998 while he was studying his first level in Computer Applications. After that, and at the same time while he was working, he continued studying and made his second level in Telecommunications and Systems. Finally he received his bachelors three-years degree in Computers science from the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) in 2006.

Previous to work with us he was working as a J2EE Tech Leader on diverse projects for the Catalan Certification Agency (CATCert), and on the Catalan Government Department (DGAP) for the Ministry of Telecommunications and Information Society (STSI) and the Center for Telecommunications and Information Technologies (CTTI) of Catalonia.


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Strands Personal Finance

Edward Chang

Edward Chang

Vice President Strategy & Business Development, SPF

Edward joined SPF in 2009 as Director of Strategy and Business Development. He brings over 14 years of finance and business experience to Strands. He is responsible for the global business development efforts of the B2B division which includes sales to global financial institutions and partnerships with leading financial industry solution providers.
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Prior to Strands, Edward was a Vice President in Technology Investment Banking at Citigroup Global Markets. At Citigroup, he had a leadership role in the Internet sector advising private and public companies as well as private equity firms. He has advised on several billion dollars in transactions including capital raises (IPO’s, equity and debt offerings, and private placements) and strategic transactions (buyside and sellside mergers and acquisitions).

Earlier in his career, Edward held positions performing strategic and financial analyses at eBay and investment banking at Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers. He also co-founded an Internet software company that was sold to aQuantive.

Edward holds an M.B.A from The Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. Economics from Pomona College in Claremont, California.


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Dr. Marc Torrens

Dr. Marc Torrens

Chief Innovation Officer

An innovator and engineer specializing in huge volume data-processing. Co-founder and CTO of Iconomic Systems acquired by i:FAO AG. Ph.D. Computer Science from Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
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He graduated in 1997 from the Technical University of Catalonia in Barcelona with a degree in Computer Science. From September 1996 to June 1997 he was completing his studies as an exchange student at the Artificial Intelligence Lab of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland . During that period, he developed the first version of the well-known Java Constraint Library which is currently used by many public and private institutions around the world.

He obtained a Ph.D. degree in 2002 from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology with a thesis entitled "Scalable Intelligent Electronic Catalogs". His Ph.D. research was focused on electronic catalogs and constraint-based techniques, and raised a relevant business interest in the e-commerce field.

In 1999, he co-founded Iconomic Systems S.A., a company that commercialized and developed further the concepts of his research applied to the travel domain. Iconomic Systems was financed with venture capital. From April 2000 to May 2001, besides his duties as co-founder of Iconomic Systems, he worked for the company as Technology Officer. Following the successful sale of Iconomic Systems to i:FAO A.G., he has been working for the company heading the i:FAO Future Lab. Since December 2002, he came back to the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology as a half-time postdoctoral researcher while still pursuing his i:FAO duties. At i:FAO, he was working on a cutting-edge software for supporting the business traveler which benefits from advanced techniques of Artificial Intelligence and Usability fields. As a result of that research and development, he was inventor and co-inventor of two patents currently owned by i:FAO. His research mainly focused on context-aware computing and how to apply user models to mobile devices by using constraint-based reasoning.

From 2002 to 2003, he completed his educational background with a postgraduate Certificate in Entrepreneurship, organized by Create Switzerland , Chair of Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He was member of the team who won the first phase of the business plan competition Venture 2002 organized by ETH Zurich and McKinsey & Company, Switzerland . Their business plan summary was selected as one of the 10 best among 207 other participating teams.

He is member of the American Association for Artificial Intelligence and the Catalan Association for Artificial Intelligence. Marc has published more than 20 referred papers on his work in international conferences and journals on Artificial Intelligence and Usability. He fluently communicates in Catalan, Spanish, English and French.

More details at www.marctorrens.com


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Philip Jenkins

Philip Jenkins

Chief Security/Privacy Officer

An accomplished information security professional with over 11 years of security management, network, and system engineering experience, Philip also brings expertise in the Financial Services arena.
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He was Vice President Enterprise Security Management at Friedman Billings Ramsey where he designed and implemented their information security program and infrastructure. He lead their Corporate Information Security Committee and managed all aspects of information and physical security program. Prior to FBR he provided both network and security integrity on production networks used for online credit card verification and processing services at Cyber Cash.

Philip is recognized as a leader in information security, active in the ISC, ISACA, and a nominee for Information Security Executive of the Year Mid-Atlantic 2006.


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Jim Shur

Jim Shur

Chief Software Architect

Working in software development for over 20 years, most recently as software architect at Rogue Wave Software where he worked for over 10 years on products ranging from C++ and Java classes libraries to web service development frameworks. M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University.
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Before joining Strands, Shur was a software architect at Rogue Wave Software where he worked for over 10 years on products ranging from C++ and Java class libraries to Web service development frameworks. During that time, Shur co-authored "The Elements of Java Style", published by Cambridge University Press.

Shur also worked as a programmer analyst in the textile and advertising industries.

Shur earned an M.S. in Computer Science from Oregon State University, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Math and Philosophy from the University of Rochester.


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Albert de Reina

Albert de Reina

Tech Director

Albert started working with us almost since the beginning. He joined strands at February 2005, and he has worked in several different projects since then, ending up leading the technical side on the Strands Personal Finance Unit.
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Albert is a technology passionate, he has a strong technical knowledge and technical skills in general. He is a very good team worker, an excellent problem solver, having the capacity to deeply analyze different situations, he is able to take quick and right decisions, always knowing and controlling their consequences.

Before, Albert got a certificate as a Higher Technical in Telecommunications and Computer Systems. After that he worked as a Computer Technician for several companies, while he was studying at the same time for a Bachelor degree in Computer Engineering at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC).


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Eduardo Criado

Eduardo Criado

Business Development Director

Eduardo Criado has a wide experience in process optimization and reengineering projects. He is also a specialist in developing and running software services as well as their maintenance and evolution. He graduated from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Computer Science (6 year degree).
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During last 4 years at Eurobits Tenchnologies, he was the Business Development Director. He also was the service manager of the main electronic invoicing platform for the banking system in Spain. The main clients of this platform were Caja Madrid, Bankinter, Cajamar, Bancaja, Caixa Catalunya, Banco Pastor and R.S.I. The platform also had non-financial clients as EJIE (Technica branch of the Gobierno Vasco) and Gobierno de la Rioja (both are state governments in Spain). He was responsible of their integration projects to the platfom and he designed a methodology to coordinate the service upgrading versions in order to allow old clients working on old versions of the service, work on the same platform with the new clients working on the last versions launched.

Earlier in his career, he worked at iSOCO, building software tools for supply chain projects for big industrial companies as Aceralia (Group Arcelor Mittal), Altadis, Mantequerias Arias, FeNIL and other .com companies as Aquanima, PyMarket and Optize. These projects included business solutions for supplier homologation, e-negotiation, e-auctions, e-procurement and e-invoicing.

Between 1998 and 2000, he was also founder of a couple of start-up iniciatives dealing with e-traveling and sevices for small size companies.


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Vibhor Jain

Vibhor Jain

Business Development Manager

Vibhor, a native of New Delhi, received a bachelors degree in Computer Science from the University of Delhi (NSIT). He started his career with TCS (Bombay) as Hardware engineer managing IT infrastructure for global client.
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In 2003, Vibhor moved to Finland to pursue Masters studies at University of Joensuu. Only to drop-out later and focus fully on his entrepreneurial venture. A start-up he co-founded to commercialize an identification technology based on Voice Biometric. He later joined number of start-ups and help them bring innovation from research labs to market.

All through out his career, Vibhor has had exposure in multifarious industries and takes keen approach in understanding individual industry structure and intricacies involved. Some of the industries he worked in the past include: Telecom & Media, Clothing fashion, Online gaming, I.T. Services, emerging industries like nanotechnology, Social Media and Banking & Financial services. He has widely interacted with the national press, media during his entrepreneurial days.

Taking a hands-on approach towards his work, he has performed cross-section of functional roles: ranging form Technology centric to Commercial focussed roles. His speciality lies in Product management, Strategy, and Business development. He challenges conventional thinking.

Vibhor possesses broad international experience having lived & worked in 3 different countries and interacted with people from all corners of the world during his entire profession life. Vibhor joined Strands in Aug'2008


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Strands Social Discovery

Oliver Bremer

Oliver Bremer

Vice President

Oliver Bremer is Vice President of Mobile, where he is focusing on consumer products, consumer experience and mobile products.
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Prior to joining Strands, Oliver served more than 6 years with Nokia, where he held several positions including leading the development of the OMA DRM 1.0 and 2.0 standards, technical product manager for mobile music application and manager of new business and licensing as a member of the team developing the Nokia Music Service.

Oliver studied at The University of Siegen, Germany and The University of Tulsa, OK, U.S., where he held a research assistantship with The Center for Information Security. He holds an M.S. in computer science and is the author and co-author of several conference publications.

He is a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation.


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Cándido Zuriaga

Cándido Zuriaga

Senior Technology and Data Director

Currently doing management tasks for Strands.com leading a 12-people group, and previuosly working with databases for over nine years for Strands, Tirant Lo Blanch and iSOCO. Expertise in different technologies, Oracle, MySQL, MSSQL Server, PostgreSQL, etc. Data management and all the processes around data.
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Candido finished his five-year degree in computer science at the Computer Science Faculty (FIV) of the Technical University of Valencia (UPV) between 1990 and 1995.

He has been working for several companies in the past, as Database and System Administrator for Tirant Lo Blanch, an online book store, six years as Database Administrator for iSOCO (Intelligent Software Components SA), and previosly he worked for Coritel (an Accenture Company in Spain) and BBVA.

Previous work at Strands has been the definition, development and get ready into production of BBVA Tu Cuentas, a personal finance system for BBVA, one of the biggest banks in Spain.


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Gerardo Gomez

Gerardo Gomez

Tech Director, strands.com

Gerardo Gomez is the Mobile Tech Lead at Strands. He leads a group of 10 Mobile Software Developers with high expertise on Mobile Technologies.
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Hardworking and extra-motivated, Gerardo is a real team builder and has created one of the most promising mobile teams out there.

Gerardo holds a BSc degree in Telecommunications from Zaragoza Polytechnic University. His first contact with mobiles happened before he graduated. He moved to Madrid to work for Microelectronica, currently M-Systems. Diving into sim card development over Javacard, he had the chance to work for Telefonica Mobiles. Once he graduated, he changed the blue of Telefonica for the red of Vodafone, joining the new Vodafone Software Development Center in Huesca . Working as Mobile Software Analyst, he took part in the mobile engineers' team that achieved the goal of turning it into a Global Vodafone R&D Center.

Endorsed by his excellent work at Vodafone in international projects, he moved to Oregon (US) on February 2006 to work for Strands. He co-developed the awarded Strands Social Player, and started to build the current Mobile Team. He is now based in Zaragoza, Spain.


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Vicent Gozalbes

Vicent Gozalbes

Tech Director, strands.com

I studied Telecommunications Science at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. While in college, I worked in information security and system consultancy, where I had my first contact with networks and web programming.  Read more »

After I got my degree, I entered the Valencia headquarters of Korean multinational LG.Nortel, where I specialized in computer networks, Voice over IP and wireless telephone.

My true hobby was still web programming, so all these years I devoted most of my tome to studying new programming languages. In 2007 I learnt about Ruby On Rails and I was immediately set to specialize on that language, with several personal projects. In September 2008 I entered Strands as a Ruby developer. 


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Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor

Tech Director, strands.com

Steve Taylor is a software engineer with over 10 years of experience working on projects ranging from C++ class libraries, Java build and test automation systems, J2EE, and Ruby on Rails applications. He's worked for Rogue Wave Software, Hewlett-Packard, and now Strands Labs. Steve holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Oregon.

 
William Hart

William Hart

Creative Director, strands.com

Weszt Hart is a veteran front-end designer and developer who specializes in visually dynamic, high-profile web sites and applications. In the last 10 years, he has worked with Walt Disney World, Humana, Hilton, and Hooters Calendar - among others.
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Prior to joining the Strands team, Weszt was the Senior Director of Interactive Design at 3cStudios (Orlando, FL) where he co-developed a line of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications as well as developing and coding custom websites for a wide range of clients: restaurant chains, non-profit organizations, insurance companies, artists, social networks, etc. One long term project - a social network for high school and amateur athletes - set Weszt on a path that eventually led to Strands.

In May of 2009, Weszt moved to Corvallis, OR to work on Strands.com.


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Wolfgang Bremer

Wolfgang Bremer

Director of Design and User Experience, strands.com

Wolfgang Bremer is Director of Design and User Experience and he is the Design-Lead of Strands’ Social Media products for desktop and mobile. He supervises a team of designers and developers, located at different Strands offices.
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Trained with a professional education in Germany and equipped with more than ten years of knowledge and experience, Wolfgang possesses extreme attention for detail and combined with his work at highest standards, he creates state-of-the-art designs and graphical user interfaces for maximum user experience.

Prior to joining Strands in March 2008 Wolfgang served more than four years with a media and communications agency in Germany, where he has been involved in many high-profile web-, multimedia, and print-projects for world-wide operating clients. He did not only lead many of the design projects but also lead the implementation of web content management systems and he eventually rose to the head of the design devision.

In 2005 Wolfgang founded mediatwister to provide design and consulting on project basis for internet, multimedia, print and more.

The work Wolfgang has been involved with as Lead Designer has been distinguished with several internationally recognized awards:
- ‘BlackBerry Partners Fund™ Developer Challenge for BlackBerry® Developers - Best in Show’ Award 2008
- ‘BlackBerry Partners Fund™ Developer Challenge for BlackBerry® Developers - 1st Place, Most innovative Multimedia Application’ Award 2008
- ‘GetJar “Up and Coming” App of the Year 2008’

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Matt Downin

Matt Downin

Marketing Manager, strands.com

Matt learned to love running from his older brothers, Jeff and Andy. Andy was the 2001 USATF 1500 meter champion and a 3:55 miler. In high school in New Hampshire Matt was the Foot Locker National Cross Country Champion and won the 3,000 meters high school championship at the Penn Relays. Read more »

Matt ran collegiately at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was a two-time Big Ten Cross Country individual Champion and was twice 4th at the NCAA Cross Country Championships. He was also a two-time track and Field All-American and finished 8th at the 2000 Olympic Track and Field Trials in the 10,000 meters.

Since graduating from Wisconsin, Matt has had a stellar career focused on everything from the 10,000 meters on the track to the marathon. Matt has made two USA Cross Country teams to compete at the IAAF World Cross Country Championships. In 2001, one of those teams finished 3rd at the championships to earn a bronze medal. Matt was also 3rd at the 2005 USATF Outdoor Track and Field Championships at 10,000 meters.

Matt’s marathon career highlight is his 11th place finish at the 2005 ING New York City Marathon in a personal best time of 2:14:28. Matt was also 2nd at the 2008 Rock and Roll San Antonio Marathon in the year’s 7th fastest time by an American.
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Abel Antón

Abel Antón

Marketing Director, strands.com

I was born in Ojuel (Soria, Spain) on 24-Oct-1962, and started to run at the age of 13. I have been a top runner for 27 years. Over these years I was a marathon world champion twice, in 1997 (Athens) and 1999 (Seville).
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In 1994 I was the first Spaniard to win 2 medals: gold (10,000) and bronze (5,000) at the European Championships held in Helsinki. I was lucky enough to be in four Olympic Games: Seoul (5,000), Barcelona (5,000), Atlanta (10,000), and Sidney (Marathon), as well as in six World Championships: Rome '87 (5,000), Tokyo '91 (5,000), Stuttgart '93 (5,000), Gothenburg '95 (10,000), Athens '97 (Marathon), and Seville '99 (Marathon). I have also been to three Outdoor European Championships: Stuttgart '86, Split '90 and Helsinki '94. I got the silver medal at the Indoor Track European Championship on 3,000 at Hague '89.

I won the marathons of Berlin (1996), Seoul (1997) and London (1998).
On 1997, all of us at the Spanish Marathon Team were awarded the Prince of Asturias for Sports, after winning a Team gold medal in the Athens World Championship.
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Pablo Vega

Pablo Vega

Business Development Director, strands.com

Pablo Vega is an active sports marketing professional, university professor and amateur runner. He graduated from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Business Administration (4 year degree), also graduated from Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in Marketing Research (4 year degree), and aditionally graduated from UNED in Tourism (3 year degree).
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His academic background also includes a Master in Business Administration (MBA) in Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) where he attended with a scholarship from Fundación La Caixa, and a PhD in Universidad San Pablo-CEU. In addition, he won a scholarship from Fundacion Caja Madrid to study at the London School of Economics and Political Science on “Globalisation of Markets”

His professional career starts in the Capital Markets Department of Banco Santander Central Hispano (now Santander). After working in Arthur Andersen (now Deloitte) as a Consultant and Auditor, he joins Sogecable, the leading audiovisual group in Spain, where he assumes several responsibilities in the Internet, Advertising and Marketing Departments during the following 7 years. In 2007 he launches the Spain Office of the NBA (National Basketball Association), focusing in the Business Development of the League in Spain. In June 2009 he joins Strands.

Since 2005 he also teaches Marketing and Sports Marketing at Universidad San Pablo-CEU and Universidad Camilo Jose Cela.

Pablo has been a runner for more than 20 years and still runs competitively when he finds some free time.


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