Advisors


Dale Carey
COO of Shared Access

Dale Carey is the President and COO of Shared Access, an owner and operator of active and passive wireless infrastructure. Prior to founding Shared Access, he was the president of Wireless at American Tower/SpectraSite Inc., an NYSE listed wireless tower operator. Dale had full P&L responsibility for annual $350+ million revenue (90% of the company), $225 million of EBITDA, and 300 employee division.

Dale previously served as the President of SpectraSite's Building Division, where he pioneered the neutral host distributed antenna system model. Prior to SpectraSite, he spent 11 years with AT&T Wireless/Vanguard Cellular Systems, serving the last four years as its Vice President and General Manger for the Mid Atlantic Region. Dale holds a B.A. from Temple University and A.S. from York College.

Jordan Cohen, PhD
Former CTO of VoiceSignal

Dr. Jordan Cohen is an independent consultant at SPELAMODE, a small company specializing in Speech, Language,and Mobile Devices. He was previously a Senior Scientist at SRI International, where he served as the Principal Investigator for the DARPA GALE program for SRI, coordinating the activities of 14 subcontractors to harness speech recognition, language translation, and information annotation and distillation resources for the government.

Prior to that, Jordan was the CTO of Voice Signal Technologies, a company which produced multimodal speech-centric interfaces for mobile devices. He has also worked in the Department of Defense, IBM, and at the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeon, NJ. Jordan received his PhD in Linguistics from the University of Connecticut, preceeded by a Masters’ Degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois. He is a member of the Acoustical Society of America and the IEEE, and has published in both the classified and unclassified literature of speech and language technologies.

Larry Heck, PhD
Chief Scientist - General Manager of Microsoft Speech

Dr. Larry Heck is the General Manager - Chief Scientist of Speech at Microsoft. In this role, Dr. Heck drives the technology vision and roadmap for speech, natural language, and natural user interface (NUI) technologies. Dr. Heck joined Microsoft in early 2009 as Partner Architect for the Online Services Division R&D group. From 2005 to 2009, he was Vice President of Search & Advertising Sciences at Yahoo!, responsible for the creation, development, and deployment of the algorithms powering Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Sponsored Search, Yahoo! Content Match, and Yahoo! display advertising. From 1998 to 2005, he was with Nuance Communications and served as Vice President of R&D, responsible for natural language processing, speech recognition, voice authentication, and text-to-speech synthesis technology.

He began his career as a researcher at the Stanford Research Institute (1992-1998), initially in the field of acoustics and later in speech research with the Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory. Dr. Heck received the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 1991. He has published more than 50 scientific articles, holds key patents in speech, search, and advertising, served on numerous technical boards and organizing conference committees for the IEEE/ISCA.

Mark Slaven
CEO of Tolt Service Group

Mark is currently the CEO of Tolt Service Group (previously their CFO); a private equity owned IT Services provider. Prior to joining Tolt he was the EVP and CFO of Cross Match Technologies, a leading developer of biometric products and solutions. In addition to all finance and accounting activities at CMT, he was responsible for sales, marketing, development, engineering and manufacturing. Mark served as the SVP and CFO of SpectraSite Communications, a publicly traded wireless cell tower operator. Additionally, Mark served as CFO at 3Com from 2002 to 2004. Earlier in his career he held a variety of senior financial management positions with IBM and Lexmark and has also served on the boards of two publicly traded companies.

Alumni

Jim Garrity
Former CMO of Wachovia Bank

Jim Garrity has worked for three Fortune 50 companies in his career in sales and marketing positions. His began his career in sales at IBM and after 14 years in sales and sales leadership roles; he transitioned into Marketing & Communications. Jim held a number of marketing and communications positions at IBM, before he left in 1992 as Director of Advertising of IBM US. Jim then joined Compaq, where he remained until 1997 when he exited as Vice President of Communications. From 1997-2007, he served as Executive Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer at First Union, which merged with Wachovia in 2001.

Jim served on the board of the Association of National Advertisers from 1995-2007. While sitting on the board of the ANA he served as founder and chairman of the ANA's New Technology Committee, a group focused on emerging developments in marketing and marketing communications techniques and technologies. During this time Jim also served as a director of the board of the AdCouncil, from 1996-2007. In addition, Jim has taught undergraduate and MBA classes at Stamford, University of California at Berkeley, Wake Forest, University of North Carolina, and Duke.

Sid Ganju
President of Teleprises

Sid Ganju is the President of Teleprises, Inc., an M&A and Telecom consulting company. Prior to founding Teleprises, Sid was Executive Director of Corporate Development for BellSouth Corporation (now AT&T), where he was responsible for initiating, structuring, negotiating and closing strategic joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions and divestitures. In this role, he executed over twenty large wireless transactions including the formation of the Cingular Wireless Joint Venture between BellSouth and SBC (Enterprise Value - $50 B) in October 2000. Mr. Ganju has also held leadership positions in the areas of business development, strategy, finance, business planning, project management and marketing. Sid holds a bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and master's degree in Business Administration. He also holds a Chartered Financial Analyst (C.F.A.) charter since 1993.

Svend-Olav Carlsen
Former CFO of PortalPlayer

Svend-Olav Carlsen has Served as VP Finance and CFO for PortalPlayer, Inc. from June 2004 through January of 2007. Prior to joining PortalPlayer, from October 2000 to June 2004, Mr. Carlsen served as vice president, finance and corporate controller and chief financial officer of Transmeta Corporation, a semiconductor company. From April 1996 to October 2000, Mr. Carlsen served in various roles in the finance organization, most recently as corporate assistant controller, director of tax and international finance of S3 Incorporated and Diamond Multimedia, Inc. which was acquired by S3 Incorporated in 1999. Mr. Carlsen is a CPA (state of Illinois) and holds an undergraduate degree and an M.B.A. (Diplom) from LMU, University of Munich, Germany.