I was pleased to undertake another contract in the horticulture industry after Priva, working with an amazing team of Data Scientists and Developers who've created a platform designed to automatically detect pests and disease at their earliest stages of development -- saving growers both on scouting time and crop loss. We've just entered the North American market with our Croptimus platform, and it's now my function and pleasure to introduce it to the region.

Founded by Ray Richards in 1998, Mindspan has undergone significant changes over the years — morphing from a public sector consultancy on matters pertaining to enterprise IT, to serving private sector concerns predominately in product management, marketing, mobile development, and web application development, with a particular focus on cloud-based technology solutions.

Mindspan was contracted by Priva, the world’s largest supplier of environmental control systems for high-tech greenhouses, to promote the new Priva Horticulture Innovation Lab (PHIL), to a global audience. Ray was responsible for key messaging, in addition to development of automated digital workflows to facilitate both in and outbound marketing across a wide variety of platforms and mediums. Further, Ray led the team tasked with defining the vision and technology implementation for a complete reworking of Priva’s legacy labour management ERP solution, FS Performance.

As Product Director for Motorleaf, an agricultural technology company specializing in artificial intelligence for commercial greenhouse and R&D facilities, Ray was responsible for delivering vision, roadmap, and interfacing with key stakeholders to define product priorities and opportunities across our software, hardware, and AI product lines. As a Certified Scrum Product Owner, he also engaged with the development team and internal stakeholders via bi-weekly iterations to ensure our products were delivered on time and budget, and satisfied our customer requirements.

Ray was engaged in a one year contract to commence operations for this hybrid digital and traditional print media company, product managing bilingual (English/Mandarin) business to consumer properties from inception through product release. Our products included two print publications and corresponding web applications that featured extensive back-ends which enabled both B2B ecommerce, and B2C advertising.

Ray worked with Fundstream teams tasked with delivery of e-fundraising services to variety of both public and private sector entities. These services were delivered through three separate web applications: one for program administrators, a supporters’ site, and a marketing vehicle. His primary role was product management for the design and content of the former two web applications, and to ensure appropriate traffic was driven to the latter via SEO, SEM, and social media advocacy on fundraising best practices.

DarkroomPro Magazine was a photography publication designed from the ground up for the tablet platform. Including video, 360 degree rotating graphics, audio interviews, and lots of informative articles, it featured both engaging content and was as easy to navigate as a paper based magazine.Founded by Ray Richards in 2011, DarkroomPro Magazine operated under the umbrella of Mindspan, and followed a quarterly release schedule on iTunes, until Apple discontinued the Newsstand framework. The magazine is currently on hiatus as a result.

OneBigPlanet, an online social loyalty program, engaged the services of Ray Richards under contract with Mindspan in a Product Management capacity for a period of one year. Responsibilities included:working in concert with the CEO to provide an overall vision for the product, developing new product concepts, collecting, organizing and prioritizing product development ideas and initiatives, creating product requirements documents and use cases to guide development teams through product iterations, defining scope of work for iterations, pro- viding a central point of contact between working groups to facilitate smooth team interaction, working with CEO to define key performance indicators, designing and delivering metrics for prospective investor consumption, conducting brainstorming sessions, providing competitive analysis, leading focus groups and conducting usability testing, providing pre-sales engineering support, designing A/B tests, editing marketing copy, researching emerging trends and developing product based strategies surrounding them.While OneBigPlanet wished to continue the arrangement, the company experienced a venture capital shortfall, resulting in the cessation of the relationship.

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