Strands Labs

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 analysis 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.

Prior to joining Strands, Jason spent 3 years as the Director of Finance for the Business to Business Software division of WebMD, responsible for all finance and accounting activity for a division with $100M in revenue, servicing over 300 clients. Jason’s contributions in this role including business process engineering, improved financial reporting and decision support capabilities, and M&A integrations.

Jason spent a dozen years at Intel in positions of progressive responsibility in both Finance and Information Technology. While at Intel, Jason held a variety of positions, including a leading role in implementing SAP, fiscal management of $1B construction projects, and finance management of a semiconductor plant with a $400M annual operating budget which employed over 2,000 people.

Jason received his Bachelor of Science degree in Economics from the University of California, Riverside and is currently pursuing a CMA (Certified Management Accountant) certification.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.