3. Team Moodfish™
Nik Daftary
http://www.linkedin.com/in/nikdaftary
Nik Daftary is Moodfish’s frontman and one of the company’s original co-founders. In addition to leading the company towards its launch, he is responsible for Moodfish’s overall business strategy, partner relationship management and online execution.
Previously, Nik served as a customer relationship management (CRM) consultant at Accenture, where he led the development of an industry-first, digital CRM feature for Fortune 50 telecom and software clients. Prior to his work with Accenture, Nik worked at Target Corporation developing buying and branding strategies and recognizing his interest in marketing consumer-facing products. Nik holds a B.S. in marketing and finance from Trinity University and a M.B.A. in marketing and entrepreneurship from The University of Texas at Austin. Nik is also an avid music lover and an electronic music DJ.
Twin B Creative (Jackson & William Blacklock)
William Blacklock:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/wtblacklock
As a graduate from the Texas Creative Sequence through the University of Texas at Austin, William has a foundation in creative concepting and art direction – where the Big Idea is the keystone for every project. William has continued down the advertising path in art direction roles with two high-profile Austin agencies. Starting at Sicola Martin he worked on a variety of accounts including BMC Software, AMD, Océ Printers and Freescale. He continued his career path with nFusion becoming a Senior Art Director, where he was tapped to create integrated online and off-line campaigns, sites or identity packages for nearly all of their clients, including: Toshiba, bp, Anheuser Busch (Beer Society,BACARDI Silver), Brinker International (Chili’s), Heelys, Fox (Ice Age 2, Family Stone) and Wilshire Homes. Much of the above work has been nationally recognized through the Advertising Federations ADDY awards, PRINT magazine for print and interactive executions as well as the Webby awards. William has since created TwinB Creative, LLC with his twin brother to continue his growth as a creative, an entrepreneur and an innovator.
Jackson Blacklock:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/jackson-blacklock/4/149/740
Jackson is a musician, programmer, businessman and designer, and with a hyperactive drive and a hefty dose of caffeine conquers them all…most of the time. He has a music degree, a business/CS degree from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin and a few album credits. He started coding and designing while touring which gradually morphed from the basic poster design and HTML site to Flash (AS2, AS3), Ruby on Rails, Visual Basic, .Net Framework, Visual Studio, Subversion, PHP, MySQL, SQL, AJAX, XHTML, XML, CSS, Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign stuff. He formed TwinB with the thought that, with his brother, could provide an easy-to-understand and pretty-to-look at-approach to websites, marketing and life.
Josh Rachner:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/joshrachner
Josh Rachner has been with TwinB since August 2008, as a back-end developer and system specialist. He has helped move development forward by being involved in the design, implementation, and testing of the back-end data crawlers, and data processing/validation features. In his free time, he enjoys playing water polo, juggling, and riding his unicycle. He is currently working full-time with Sense Corp, but continues to contributes his expertise to Moodfish whenever possible.
John Underwood
http://www.linkedin.com/in/johnu
When we’re not looking, John pumps out stellar code. John has been with Moodfish since mid-2010 and has been our lead systems and application developer. Prior to working with Moodfish, John has freelanced as a ruby and PHP ninja building out the back-end systems for event organizers and non-profit organizations. To date, John has been chief-ninja behind the new front-end and back-end functionality at Moodfish. After graduating from the University of Texas with a CS degree, John joined a recruiting software company. Working with the Java stack, he took over two products and migrated the entire product line into a newarchitecture and suite concept. In 2008, he started his company JohnU to work with entrepreneurs to execute their visions in code. Projects include Webby-nominated campaigns with Charity:Water, online scholarship applications with ScholarSelect and runner registration and check-in systems for EventData Solutions. John implements Moodfish backend work with Ruby on Rails and investigates technologies like Hadoop to expand the algorithmic capacity of Moodfish.
Don Turnbull
http://www.linkedin.com/in/donturn
Don Turnbull, Ph.D. is a consultant specializing in software research and development focusing on search systems (information seeking and retrieval), analytics, user experience design, semantic and knowledge management technologies as well as intellectual property analysis. Previously, Don was an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he taught and researched informetrics, information architecture, classification systems and other information science topics.
Don received his doctorate from the University of Toronto focusing on Knowledge Discovery (Data Mining) for Informetric and Behavioral Models of Web Use. He is the author of numerous academic papers and presentations, as well as the co-author of “Web Work: Information Seeking and Knowledge Work on the World Wide Web” published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. Don was also a principal and the Director of Advanced Development at Outride, Inc., a Xerox PARC spin-off company that developed in personalized information retrieval applications as well as technology patents, that was acquired by Google. In the nascent days of the World Wide Web, Don was the Lead Technical Architect at IBM Interactive Multimedia, working on the World Book/IBM Multimedia Encyclopedia and other large-scale information architecture design and development projects.
Don is also applying his scientific acumen for good and is currently conducting empirical research to perfect his dream of the artisan Tex-Mex pizza. More information about Dr. Turnbull is available at http://donturn.com/about
Bart Bohn
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/bart-bohn/0/576/731
Bart Bohn is the Director of the ATI-Wireless and Information-Technology Incubators. He is responsible for identifying promising early stage companies and providing them with the necessary strategic business assistance to help them achieve their growth objectives. Bart has significant experience in advising companies on strategic issues and working with executive teams to identify and pursue strategic objectives. He has developed several new programs to foster and support entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the founding mentor and UT-Austin host of 3 Day Startup, founding director of the ATI-SEAL program (Student Entrepreneur Acceleration & Launch) and founder of the “WNCG Hatchery Class.” In the community, Bart serves on the boards of MobileMondayAustin, which supports the mobile developer and application community, and Semantic Web Austin, which is positioning Austin for national leadership in the emerging semantic web / “web 3.0” space. Bart is also the chair of the Texas Wireless Summit, which is a region-leading industry conference co-hosted by UT’s Wireless Networking and Communications Group (WNCG) and the Wireless Seed Stage Forum, which provides early stage wireless and mobile startups with direct access to relevant angel, venture capital and corporate investors. Bart is also one of the hosts of the Entrepreneur Lounge at SXSWi, an invite only VIP event during the Interactive Conference at SXSW.
Before joining ATI, Bart was an engagement manager with BearingPoint Consulting and advised clients on strategy, strategy development, strategy implementation and business process design. He was the founding engagement manager of BearingPoint’s Energy Strategy practice and was responsible for designing the methodologies for the core offerings and building the team. In addition to serving energy clients, he served clients in the professional services, software, banking and utilities industries.Bart holds a MBA from The University of Texas at Austin, a BS in Chemical Engineering and a BS in Finance from Trinity University.
Bart is also the founder of the unofficial breakfast taco marathon club.
Zelal Gungordu
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/zelal-gungordu/1/96b/87b
On board since October 2008, Zelal is Moodfish’s lead natural language developer and computational linguist. She designed and developed the original mood-based search capabilities of the Moodfish search engine. Zelal holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh where she specialized in natural language processing and computational linguistics.
Prior to joining Moodfish, Zelal held an eight-year tenure as an artificial intelligence (AI) researcher and developer at Cycorp, where she served as lead developer on AI applications for a wide variety of domains including natural language processing, data integration, and computer network security. She is author of publications in areas ranging from computational linguistics and AI applications to computer network security and data integration problems.
Aakash Parekh
http://www.linkedin.com/in/aakashp
Aakash Parekh is a member of the Moodfish board of directors and one of the company’s original co-founders. He has served on the board since the company’s incorporation. Aakash is a patent attorney, licensed by the State Bar of Texas and registered to practice before the United States Patent and Trademark Office. He works at an intellectual property law firm in Austin. Prior to his legal career, Aakash worked as a software engineer at FactSet Research Systems, developing investment portfolio analysis software.
Aakash holds a J.D. from the University of Texas School of Law and a B.S. in computer science from the University of Texas at Austin. He is a die-hard sports fan and can frequently be seen at the football stadium or in front of a TV on fall Saturdays.