Ars Nova Capital is a private equity fund manager focused on the intersection between entertainment media and its enabling technologies. Leading portfolio companies include Photonica, Inc. and Avanti Studios.http://www.arsnovacapital.com/http://www.photonica-inc.com/Business Development in distributed production partnerships in the Americas and Europe, to connect production and technology partners into the Avanti Studio umbrella.

Creation of new digital products and services, enabled by strategic fund investment. Requirements management and communication & collaboration with internal/external stakeholders. Conceptualization of MVP products across diverse spectrum of devices and platforms.Diverse domain knowledge following several b2b and b2c projects in gaming, animation, sports, education and consumer security & privacy.

www.SmarterKidsCode.comSmarterKidsCode provides computer science enrichment and software coding instruction to kids, beginning in elementary school, who are looking beyond the rapidly growing Hour Of Code movement. Ideal for schools, corporate sponsored events or simply parents who desire instruction for their kids!We partner with parents, schools and other community organizations to help demystify computer science and coding for kids, by providing school day enrichment workshops, after school coding classes and private lessons in real world programming languages like JavaScript, Python and Java.Coding in various programming languages is now a common curriculum in school — so much so that the College Board Advanced Placement (AP) offers both the AP Computer Science A and AP Computer Science Principles exams.Code.org estimates that by 2020, there will be 1,000,000 more jobs than computer science degrees. Computer Science is a top paying college degree and computer programming jobs are growing at 2x the national average! We need to make sure our children fill those positions!

Partnered with Product, Sales and Engineering teams to implement studio tool: AssetHub.Technical liaison between Customers, Support, and Engineering. Mapped studio business processes to development and implementation requirements. Participated in studio meetings with Account Executives and Account Managers. Managed Feature requests, requirements and user story prioritization of backlog. Performed Acceptance Testing to gate each feature release prior to push to production. Leveraged technical development and db expertise to troubleshoot customer issues, including db queries in PostgreSQL.

Startup focused on social b2c sports venue discovery and e-commerce product. Developed business plan and worked to secure investment funding. Co-conceived vision, strategy and overall goals. Led big-picture roadmap, features & functionality, requirements, use cases, design mockups to prototype webservice.

Blueprint/EALA Studio promoted next-gen distributed development through the concept of smaller intellectual property core teams and production resources in the form of external developers and contractors.Responsible for conceiving and implementing technology solutions to reduce fixed costs and facilitate Blueprint/EALA's transformational focus on People, Process, and Technology.Co-wrote the baseline infrastructure business case and strategy which required effective collaboration across the Executive Team, 3 development teams, and EA IT to agree upon a plan of action to bootstrap this new studio within the legacy environment.Reported to COO, CTO, then directly to GM.Created D-SPE (Distributed Secure Production Environment).• A secure, cloud-based game production environment utilizing Linux virtualization.• Generated business objectives and strategy, conceptual design, and conversion to requirements to ensure that all required development tools and services were available.• Collaborated across stakeholders: 2 internal and 1 external game development teams, CTO and Blueprint/EALA GM.• Managed external hosting contractor, Bitpusher, to spin up initial prototype while balancing requirements against time to release and project risks.• Delivered a prototype on time and within budget in 2 months, then tested production-ready external environments with contracted onshore development teams.

Selected by COO at EALA to build and iterate on reference workflow process and documentation for secure studio outsourcing for EALA Epoxy Outsourcing Group.Delivered proven process, asset specific pipelines and technical tool-sets to 3rd party artists and developers to support distributed production.Wrote and vetted criteria for technical and security evaluation of potential outsourcing vendors. Efforts sustained the EALA outsourcing model which drove towards smaller core teams focused on developing multiple titles, resulting in reduced overall fixed costs.Mapped all Epoxy business processes, work and user flows. Integrated technology solutions for automation and efficiency gains. Served on the steering committee for global outsourcing at EA, while representing the interests of EALA. Provided input across all facets of outsourcing and made many recommendations regarding policy and process which were incorporated into the final charter of the EA Worldwide Outsourcing Group.EPOXY process and workflow were leveraged by the EA Worldwide Outsourcing Group to assist with alignment across studios. EPOXY was considered an outsourcing knowledge center, providing turn-key solutions to development teams.Led efforts to gather digital asset management requirements for the overall EALA studio. Requirements used in development of a production management, asset life-cycle tool, with markup and reporting, called project-GAME.

Co-created and licensed:• AUTOMATTE, a high speed, high volume background removal tool used in commercial photography and imaging (based on research by Smith-Blynn of Microsoft in 1996). Produced vision & strategy, business requirements and design documentation including use cases, workflow and UI. Directly managed development which produced the initial MacOS implementation. Evaluated and prioritized feedback to implement functional enhancements. This tool was licensed by New York commercial photography studio, Image Info, to automatically remove the background from product photography.• APEX (Analytical Production Executive), a production planning and tracking database in MS Access. Used by film/animation studios (FOX/Bluesky, Warner Bros.) to manage daily production, provide fore casting and explore cost/time scenarios.

Animation Technology consultant advising new studio operation and the animated series, GOD, THE DEVIL & BOB, produced for NBC.Liaison between Producers, overseas studios: Fil Cartoons, Virtual Magic Asia and CW IT group.Built out new studio location; specified WAN/LAN, data center, servers, production systems, and remote connectivity.Digitized traditional production workflow using US Animation software suite. Enabled digital creative direction to overseas studios by supplying digital animatics, color models and key backgrounds.

Initially relocated to Pentafour Studios in Madras, India to overhaul the troubled animated production "King and I", produced for Morgan Creek / Warner Bros. Later relocated to Colorland Studios in Hong Kong/Shenzhen, China to continue overseas supervision of 2 additional shifts of artists. Supervised overseas 2D coloring, 3D model creation, scene compositing & rendering of the animated feature film.Managed 2D and 3D production staff of 60+ while tuning workflow and pipeline at both studios. All 2D sequences pushed through an Animo pipeline of image processing, ink & paint, compositing, SFX and rendering. The Alias CG artists modeled 3D elements which were composited into 2D scenes.Wrote onsite production tools to track elements by scene and sequence. Developed reference processes and procedures to track completed footage by artist, day, week, month and project life cycle. Managed all prioritization, scheduling, tracking/reuse, creative iteration, and technical verification.

IT Support in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto and London for:CorporateAMBLIN (Theatrical Development, Theatrical Distribution)DreamWorks AnimationTV AnimationWorld-Wide Pay TVDreamWorks Animation:The Prince of EgyptTV Animation:Managed overall support staff, needs assessments, strategic planning and budgets (staffing, hw, sw). Supported animation production office, managed 2 analysts plus freelancers in a cross-platform environment of Win95, NT 4.0, Macintosh and NeXT systems.Supported 3 weekly episodic shows, 1 direct to video title, and a CGI workgroup.Worked closely with production heads to evaluate and implement digital tools into a traditional environment.Headed long term project which evaluated scanning, coloring & annotation and color calibration processes.Credits on TOONSYLVANIA, INVASION AMERICA and others.