Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Alex Bard, VP and GM of Desk.com, a Salesforce Company (Part 1)

Desk.com was founded in 2009 under the name of Assistly. The company released the premiere version of its Desk.com product in September 2010. By September 2011, the company had been acquired by Salesforce.com and Desk.com became one of many offerings that Salesforce.com provides for its international clientele.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Alex. Let’s start with a bit of context about you and the part of Salesforce.com that you’re responsible for. >>>

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Brent Lang, President of Vocera (Part 1)

Effective communication is vital for the success of any business, but for hospitals and other health care facilities, it’s an absolute must. Vocera helps by providing mobile communication solutions that address the most serious communication challenges that health care workers face every day. More than 750 health care organizations use Vocera solutions to function more efficiently.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Brent. Let’s start with a bit of context. What do you do? What’s unique about the work you do? What are the scope and scale of your company? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mike Afergan, Senior VP & GM of Web Experience Business Unit, Akamai (Part 1)

Those who read my blog regularly will recognize the company Akamai. I have featured it in several Technology Stocks posts as well as in an interview with Willie Tejada for my Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing series and an interview with Tom Leighton for Entrepreneur Journeys. Since being founded in 1998, Akamai has been a company that  accelerates and delivers content and value-added services to an international collection of customers.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mike. Let’s start with a bit of context about Akamai’s presence in the mobile and social domain. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: David Aronchick, Co-Founder and CEO of Hark (Part 1)

If you like keeping up with what your favorite celebrity, sports figure, or even your best friend or favorite relative has said, then you’ll love Hark. Founded by David Aronchick and Fouad El Naggar in 2007, this Seattle-based company has become one of the 10 largest entertainment/movies sites on the Web, according to comScore.  Approaching 100 million users per month worldwide, content from Hark gives users an engaging entertainment experience while providing advertisers with a rich pool of potential customers for their clients.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Dave. Let’s start with a bit of context. Tell us about Hark, what you’re doing, and where the company is at this point. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark Hyland, VP of Sales and Marketing, QuickPlay Media (Part 1)

People have grown so accustomed to online media, particularly newspapers and magazines, that they hardly give them a second thought. Pioneers like Mark Hyland and QuickPlay Media co-founders explored the world of online media before computers and the Internet were as commonplace as radio and television, which have also moved online.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mark. Let’s start with a bit of your beginning, and since you were an early founder/investor/CEO, I want you to bridge the story of the two founders as well. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Markos Symeonides, EVP, Axios Systems (Part 1)

Business professionals rely heavily on their companies’ IT departments, and the larger the company, the larger the demand. Fortunately, there are companies like Axios Systems that have developed ways to make IT service management for medium to large enterprises easier and more efficient. Founded in 1988 by Tasos Symeonides, Axios remains a privately owned company operated by the Symeonides family. The company has acquired a global clientele, has headquarters in the United States and the United Kingdom, and stands at $50 million in revenue at the time of this interview.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Markos. Let’s start with some background about you and Axios Systems. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Diarmuid Mallon, Head of Product Marketing for Sybase, an SAP Company, on Mobile Banking (Part 1)

People can use their mobile phones to do just about anything these days, including personal banking. Founded in Berkeley, California, in 1984 by Mark Hoffman and Bob Epstein, Sybase started out as a company that provided enterprise infrastructure and mobile software until it acquired Mobile 365, Inc. in 2006.  The acquisition of Mobile 365 introduced Sybase to the world of SMS. Acquired for $5.8 billion by business software provider SAP in May 2010, by the end of September 2010, the company’s Sybase 365 had delivered more than one trillion messages. That’s equal to about 32,000 messages a second for one year. Although the company continues to provide services in other areas, Sybase continues to thrive in the mobile space.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Diarmuid. Let’s start with some background about you and the group in Sybase that you work with. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Frank Dale, CEO of Compendium (Part 1)

When it comes to effectively attracting new business, content marketing is one of the latest successful trends. If you’ve ever worked with WordPress, Type Pad, Movable Type, or even Blogger, you may have noticed they have a few things in common. Rest assured that although the aforementioned blogging platforms may have a few similarities, they’re not all the same. For example, another perhaps lesser-known platform, Compendium, allows blog owners to have greater control over approval and to even list topics or target keywords so that writers always know what kind of content they’re required to produce. Co-founded in 2007 by ExactTarget founder Chris Baggot and Ali Sales Roach, the Indianapolis, Indiana-based Compendium has garnered recognition in Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Frank. Let’s start with some context about you and Compendium. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Penny Herscher, CEO of FirstRain (Part 1)

The sales and marketing teams of large enterprises have their work cut out for them when it comes to curating new business. So, they welcome companies like FirstRain that facilitate the research that’s required to effectively cultivate relationships with prospects. FirstRain is an international company based in San Mateo, California. With satellite offices in New York City and Gurgaon, India, FirstRain serves its global enterprise clientele by combining its technology with social enterprise platforms such as Salesforce.com, Microsoft SharePoint, Jive and Cisco Quad and makes use of research platforms like Standard & Poor’s Capital IQ, FactSet Research Systems, Dun & Bradstreet, Fidelity.com, and Mergent.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Penny. Let’s start with your background and FirstRain’s background. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Mark McCormick, Senior VP of Customer Experience, Internet Services Group at Wells Fargo (Part 1)

San Francisco, California–based Wells Fargo is a financial services company that offers banking, insurance, investments, mortgage, and consumer and commercial finance services throughout the United States. With 270,000 employees working in more than 80 businesses nationwide, Wells Fargo has come a long way over the past 160 years. Always moving forward, like the stagecoach that symbolizes it, Wells Fargo now embraces mobile and social technologies that make life easier for their customers and clients.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Mark. Let’s start with some background about you as well as what’s happening at Wells Fargo and in the domain of mobile and social, and then we’ll take it into the more comprehensive technology and trends discussion. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Bernardo de Albergaria and Tommy Ahlers of Citrix Online (Part 1)

Santa Barbara, California–based Citrix Online is a division of Citrix Systems with branch offices all over the world. Citrix Online’s cloud service offerings – GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToMyPC, GoToTraining, GoToAssist, and GoToAssist Corporate – are accessed and used by approximately 17,000 new users each month. In May 2012, the company announced that it had won the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) 2012 CODiE Award for its GoToMeeting apps for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Sramana Mitra: Hi, Bernardo. Hi, Tommy. Why don’t we start with each of you giving a bit of background to set the context and directional perspective on where Citrix is going from your point of view? >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Peter Hudson, Founder of iTriage (Part 1)

People want simplicity, efficiency and facility in everything they do. Monitoring and maintaining their health is no exception. In fact, when they’re not feeling well and want answers, people tend to be more rather than less impatient.

iTriage LLC, is a Denver, Colorado–based global health care technology company that was founded in 2008 by two emergency medicine physicians. iTriage makes it easier for people to figure out what might be wrong with them, and where they should seek treatment. Consumers around the world have downloaded iTriage’s free mobile app to their iPhones and Androids, and health care providers use it to share with those consumers important health information.  >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Pete Lagana, Founder of Excellis Interactive (Part 1)

Excellis Interactive, based in Chesterbrook, Penn., is a company that serves businesses, primarily, in the life sciences industry, by converting enterprise software, websites and mobile solutions into applications by creating relationships between the way that users work and the way that they experience the applications they use to facilitate or support their day-to-day work functions. Excellis’ primary focus is on customer relationship management (CRM), so many of the company’s solutions focus on making the end user’s life less complicated.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Pete. Let’s start with context for our audience. Tell us a little bit about yourself as well as Excellis. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Chris Ruff, CEO of UIEvolution (Part 1)

UIEvolution is a software development company with offices in the United States and Japan. The company creates software solutions that break through the complexity of connected services by delivering native and HTML5 apps that are managed from a cloud-based platform. UIEvolution’s clients include well-known, elite enterprises like ESPN, Toyota, AT&T, Microsoft, Samsung, Hikari-TV, and many Fortune 500 companies.

Sramana Mitra: Hi Chris. If you could, give us some context about yourself and your company UIEvolution. >>>

Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Will Overstreet, CEO of Voices Heard Media (Part 1)

“Voices Heard Media released new data results demonstrating that its suite of social engagement applications (the EventBox) has increased unique visitors to clients’ sites by as much as 49%. The increased traffic was the result of social sharing of events, such as contests, polls and Q&As, to social media sites by participating users. In sharing the events, the participating users lured their friends from Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarks and other social sites to client sites to participate in the events.” So goes the first paragraph of a press release from the Voices Heard Media website. Anyone who’s ever doubted the power of the Internet and social media for promoting a product, a service or a personal brand might be inclined to change his mind after reading a paragraph like that. But, as my interview with Will Overstreet reveals, Voices Heard Media helps its clients promote themselves in a truly unique way. >>>