Vlingo

Dave is President & CEO of Vlingo. He joined Vlingo in 2007 from Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone maker, where he was a General Manager and responsible for leading Nokia's entry into the mobile email market.

Grannan has extensive experience in the mobile and software industries and a proven track record for launching and growing new businesses. Prior to Nokia, Grannan held various executive positions in the wireless and software industries. Early in his career Grannan was part of the communications industry group at Accenture, where he advised new entrants in the PCS market on market entry strategies, and from there he joined Sprint PCS as a General Manager to help launch what became the fastest growing US wireless carrier. Later, Grannan served as President and CEO of Geoworks, a global wireless data software company. Prior to joining Nokia, he was vice president of partners at Openwave.

Grannan started his career in the US Marine Corps where he led a unit responsible for the deployment of spread spectrum wireless position location systems in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in Kuwait and Iraq. Dave holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley.

Mike is Co-Founder and CTO of Vlingo. Mike has been active in the speech technology world for over twenty years. He started his career as a researcher first at Carnegie Mellon University and then at the Spoken Language Systems group at MIT working on core technology for automatic speech recognition. In 1994, he founded SpeechWorks based on technology that he and others had developed at MIT.

Over the next ten years, Mike and team grew SpeechWorks from a small startup in a new market into the market leader in the now established market for speech enabled call center solutions. SpeechWorks was responsible for many of key innovations in use today in the speech recognition systems deployed throughout the world.

In 2003, SpeechWorks was acquired by ScanSoft (now named Nuance). Mike joined ScanSoft as CTO and oversaw technology integration and development across the product groups. In 2005, Mike left ScanSoft to spend a year as a visiting scientist at MIT before starting Vlingo in the summer of 2006.

John is Co-Founder and VP of Engineering of Vlingo. Prior to Vlingo, he was at Groove Mobile, a leading mobile music platform provider, where he was VP of Engineering. At Groove Mobile, he recruited the technical team and managed all research, development and operations of the critically-acclaimed music application for many mobile operators, including services with Sprint, Bell Canada, Orange, and 3. In addition, he initiated Groove Mobile's key innovations in mobile content search, superdistribution, and recommendations.

Prior to Groove Mobile, Nguyen was Senior Director of Network Speech Products at ScanSoft (now Nuance) where he joined as a result of the SpeechWorks acquisition. At ScanSoft, he managed research and development on all network speech recognition products, including the core speech-recognition engine and application modules for enterprise, auto-attendant, and directory assistance. Prior to ScanSoft, he was Director of Speech Products for SpeechWorks where he managed research and development on the speech recognition engine and platform.

Nguyen holds Ph.D. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from MIT and B.S. degrees in Math and Computer Science from MIT.

Charlie is Vice President of Operations and Customer Services for Vlingo. He joined the company in November of 2007, bringing deep expertise in speech recognition from his role at SpeechWorks International (now Nuance) as vice president of professional services where he led the professional services and sales engineering organizations.

At SpeechWorks, Charlie grew professional services revenues six fold over five years and grew the team from 15 people to more than 120 across 12 offices worldwide. Prior to SpeechWorks, he was a senior manager at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) in its Financial Services practice. He also held various engineering, analysis and marketing positions with Intel Corporation, Exxon Chemical Americas and Marathon Oil.

Charlie earned an MS in Management from the Sloan School at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelor of Science degree in applied science from Miami University. He currently resides in Amesbury, Massachusetts.

Tom is Chief Financial Officer of Vlingo. In his role as CFO, Tom is responsible for Vlingo's finance and accounting operations, legal, human resources and investor relations. He brings to the company over twenty five years of extensive financial and operations experience from various high technology software and services companies.

Most recently Tom was CFO of Sermo. Tom joined Sermo from Relicore, Inc. where he served as VP of Finance and Operations and was instrumental in the successful acquisition of Relicore by Symantec Corporation (SYMC). Prior to joining Relicore, Tom served as Vice President of Finance and Administration for Revenio, Inc., where he gained invaluable fundraising experience via venture capital and debt financings. Before this, he was Vice President and Controller of NewsEdge Corporation where he led the company's accounting and finance functions from start-up, through successful IPO and several acquisitions, helping to build the company into an $80 million market leader.

Tom holds a Bachelor's degree from Bentley University.

Chris is EVP of Global Sales. In his role as Executive Vice President of Global Sales, Chris and his team are responsible for building and growing Vlingo’s business relationships worldwide with all handset OEMs, network operators and strategic partners.

Most recently, Chris served as the senior vice president of global sales at Handmark where he was responsible for partner relationships in all channels including retailers, network operators and handset OEMs. He established various distribution agreements for Handmark with some of the largest wireless operators around the world, including Sprint, AT&T, Telus, and Alltel.

Prior to Handmark, Chris was with Rand McNally for six years in several technology-focused sales and marketing positions, including director of sales and marketing, as well as digital products. He led the business development team that released one of the earliest downloadable Java applications. Before Rand McNally, Barnett was with Monster Worldwide, Inc. as VP and General Manager of the firm's largest operating division.

Chris earned his MBA from Loyola University Chicago with majors in Information Systems and Marketing. He also holds a B.S. in Economics from Columbia University in New York.

Troy is VP of Sales and Alliances for the Americas and Asia. Troy is responsible for establishing and managing Vlingo's customer relationships including carriers, device manufacturers, and mobile developers. Troy brings a wealth of experience from a diverse set of companies in the telecommunication industry ranging from optical networking to mobile applications. Prior to Vlingo, he was responsible for business development and channel creation at VoIP technology supplier Sylantro Systems.

Troy started his career with AT&T where he concentrated on product development and technology planning of the carrier's enhanced services portfolio. In 2000, he left AT&T to concentrate on his love of negotiating and managing business development deals for technology companies. Since that time, Troy has held business development and sales responsibilities at Comverse, OSS supplier Syndesis, and broadband startup CoreExpress.

Troy holds a B.S. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Texas A&M University. Troy currently resides in San Antonio, TX.

Ashley is VP of Vlingo EMEA. He joined Vlingo in 2008 from Autodesk Location Based Services, where he had responsibility for the EMEA region and led the business to success with a number of carriers including Vodafone and France Telecom Orange.

Griffiths has extensive experience in the mobile and communications business, having spent fifteen years as founder of an award winning advertising agency, working on campaigns for a number of leading brands including Kodak, Royal Doulton and Celestica. Ashley moved to the client side ten years ago as VP WW Sales & Marketing at the Geoworks Corporation, a leading software provider in the mobile sector.

At Geoworks, Griffiths was responsible for pioneering a number of innovative SMS B2B and B2C solutions for leading brands including HSBC Bank, Abbey National, Tango and United Airlines "Easy Update". He was also instrumental in the businesses merger into Teleca ab.

Since then he has held a number of senior roles within the mobile industry including Teleca ab as WW Director Smartphone's and also VP EMEA at TapRoot Systems where under his leadership they became the de facto solution for the Symbian OS and were the first to market on a mobile device for Sony Ericsson.

Griffiths is based in the UK at the Vlingo European Headquarters in Manchester.

Hadley is VP of Consumer Business and is responsible for Vlingo's marketing and business development activities.

Hadley has been actively working at the intersection of business and technology for more than ten years. Prior to joining Vlingo 2007, Hadley worked in corporate strategy for Samsung, where he concentrated on telecommunications projects across North American, Europe and Asia. Before that Hadley was a Product Manager for Microsoft, working on an incubation team for a new security product, which has since grown into a large highly profitable business. He has also spent time on the investment side of the table as a Summer Associate for Charles River Ventures. Hadley began his career as a management and technology consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers and Pegasystems, where he led the design and execution of multi system implementations.

Hadley holds a MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelors of Science in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. Outside of work Hadley enjoys playing golf and mixing house music, neither of which he is particularly good at.