Circular 331 Partners
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Tag Archives: Beirut
Ville Miettinen – Microtask – Finland
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Ville is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. The last couple of years he has been particularly interested in crowdsourcing, cloud labor, and human computation — disruptive technologies that are transforming the way people work all over the world.
A hacker at heart, he has spent way too many years banging out code in assembler, C, and other languages used by real cowboys. He’s got a long background in computer graphics, and was the CTO and one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics, a pioneer in real-time 3D graphics technologies. They created some of the very first commercial 3D engines and licensed them to games companies all over the world. He was the co-author of the SurRender3D engine & Umbra visibility optimization middleware.
Later on, they wrote the first implementations of OpenGL ES, OpenVG, JSR-184 and other graphics standards, and licensed them to hundreds of millions of embedded devices in the mobile phone and automotive industries. Hybrid was acquired by NVIDIA in 2006.
These days he’s the CEO & founder at Microtask.
He is an angel investor, board member and advisor in several graphics technology, crowdsourcing & games companies in Europe and Silicon Valley. He is actively involved in the Northern European start-up scene, mentoring start-ups at, e.g., Startup Sauna, GameFounders, Nestholma, Founder Institute and HackFwd.
In his free time, he travels around the planet, and over the years have become a semi-professional photographer.
Sanjay Sabnani – CrowdGather – Los Angeles
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Prior to founding and taking CrowdGather public, Sabnani was an accomplished senior executive at several dynamic public companies in the technology and medical sectors. He has extensive deal making and transactional expertise having been involved in significant equity and debt capital raises. Sabnani is also a former financier and securities principal with extensive capital market relationships.
Sanjay Sabnani has also served as Chairman of the Board for Artwallah and TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Southern California, both non-profits.
He is published in two medical text book chapters as the only non M.D. or PhD contributor, and has authored and received patents based upon his understanding of the GABAa receptor complex and its implication in anxiety, addictive, and eating disorders.
On the rare occasion that he has spare time, Sabnani is focused on writing a book about his theories on the biological underpinnings of anxiety from a systems approach.
Mike Butcher – TechCrunch – World
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Mike Butcher (FRSA) is ‘Editor At Large’ of TechCrunch, the biggest breaking news site about the world’s hottest tech companies. Mike has been named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. As well as being a long-time Writer, Broadcaster and Editor Mike is also co-founder of TechHub (@TechHub), a project to bring European technology entrepreneurs and investors together in a club/office environment. Mike has written for UK national newspapers and magazines including The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, The Daily Telegraph and The New Statesman. He is a former editor of New Media Age magazine, the leading new media weekly in the UK, and the European edition of The Industry Standard magazine.
Since 1996 he has launched or re-launched numerous media web sites and in 2000 he was nominated as NetMedia’s European Internet Journalist of the Year. In 2004 he was voted ‘One of the 100 Innovators of the UK Internet Decade’ by GfK NOP, the fourth-largest custom research business in the world. In July 2008 he was put at No. 47 out of the Top 100 people in London’s creative industry by The Independent newspaper and The Hospital Club. In August 2008 TechCrunch Europe was awarded the best “Web 2.0 and business blog” in the UK, by the readers of Computer Weekly magazine. In 2009 it was named as one of the Top 10 blogs out of the UK. Also in 2009 he was named one of the Top 10 bloggers on Twitter in the UK. In October 2009 he was named one of the Top 50 most influential Britons in technology by The Daily Telegraph. In April 2010 he was in Wired UK’s Top 100 influencer list, again in 2011, in 2012 and in 2014. In April 2010 TechCrunch Europe was shortlisted in the Specialist Digital Publisher category of the prestigious UK-based Association of Online Publishers’ Digital Publishing Awards. In November 2010 he was named as one of London’s most influential people in New Media and “king of dotcom commentators ” by The Evening Standard Newspaper. He has been listed as one of the Top 100 most influential people on Twitter in the UK. He has spoken at the prestigious Monaco Media Forum and Le Web, among many other conferences. Mike is a regular commentator on the technology business, appearing on BBC News, Sky News, CNBC, Channel 4 and Bloomberg. Mike has served on the Mayor of London’s Digital Advisory Board, the ‘Smart London’ Board and is London Technology Ambassador for London. Mike’s personal blog is mbites, while he Twitters as @mikebutcher.
Natalia Kiskova – Bluewolf – Czech Republic
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Natalia is a Growth Manager at Bluewolf, board member of Aj Ty v IT social organisation and the daughter of the President of Slovakia. Bluewolf is a global consulting agency that builds digital solutions designed to create results. Its main focus is on design, build, and innovation for customer and employee experiences on the Salesforce platform.
Prior to her current role, where Natalia is heading up the office for Bluewolf in Prague, Czech Republic to cover CEE region, her roles have switched at Bluewolf. In the past 5 years while she moved from NYC to London to Prague office covering roles from Consultant to Project Manager. She is very passionate about expanding the knowledge of IT and it’s potential in her home region.
Being the daughter of the first independent President of the Slovak Republic that has had over 80% of popularity vote and strong entrepreneurial background, has shown her that even a small country with socialistic background has potential to be innovative, bring new ideas and create space for talent. Her aim is to motivate and support more individuals from the region to join the startup community and promote the talent and innovation.