About Us

Team

	Duncan McCall, CEO & Co-Founder Duncan has a passion and background in the “location” space spanning many years. From time spent in RFID and universal positioning startups, through to founding and leading a venture backed consumer Internet business with the goal of enabling and empowering users of location aware devices. Much of this experience has led to the vision behind PlaceIQ. Duncan’s experience in early stage businesses goes beyond this market, having lead the operational and system build of a successful retail organization, growing it to a multi location, multi state enterprise. He also built and led IS Solutions INC, a premier Silicon Valley based System Integrator. Outside of the startup environment Duncan has also made an impact for one of the world’s largest organizations in working for ExxonMobil, in the UK and Asia.
	Steve Milton, CTO & Co-Founder Steve has a proven track record of incubating new technology companies and leading them through successful growth.  His background in enterprise, internet, large data analytics and geospatial information systems led to the technical vision for PlaceIQ.  He has developed novel software solutions in several industries and worked with a great variety of “big data”.  In the early 90′s Steve was one of the first 20 employees at Trilogy. In the late 90’s Steve helped architect a Web 1.0 content portal and purchasing transaction system.  Later he was a founding member of living.com and built a highly acclaimed consumer retail site.  After the internet boom, Steve immersed himself in Big Data.  He joined the management team at Nuance where he helped scale the development and deployment of voice recognition systems.  Next, he helped a bioinformatics startup to build its core data capture and data analysis platform.  After that he incubated a startup in the insurance claims processing and appraisal space.  And most recently he led software and systems development at Digital Globe – owner of the world’s largest earth imagery database.
	Kevin Brackney, Director of Information Technology The road to PlaceIQ for Kevin has been long and varied, and has primed him for the unique challenges ahead.  Having dealt with big data since the start of his career, Kevin worked with large telecommunications providers throughout the world to architect and implement large-scale billing and customer care systems.  From there, Kevin moved into the unique realm of Internet startups serving many roles from architecture to operations for Requisite Technology, Local Matters, and most recently PublicEarth. Kevin brings a unique blend of technical and business talent to PlaceIQ.   He has a proven track record of laying the foundation from which to grow the operational framework of PlaceIQ.  Kevin is a graduate of Northern Arizona University holding dual Bachelor’s degrees in Accountancy and Computer Information Systems.
	Jason Kessler, Data Scientist Jason Kessler is a data scientist at PlaceIQ and a researcher in text analysis and social media mining.  At PlaceIQ, he is working to mine useful signals from a cacophony of location encoded data.  His research has included the development of new methods in semantic analysis of text in social media, the current, state-of-the-art method for detecting the topic of evaluative words or phrases, and a patent-pending method for using Amazon Mechanical Turk to quickly and cheaply build a richly annotated dataset for sentiment analysis.  Additionally, Jason led a project to develop a ground-breaking, manually annotated set of documents which encode how individual expressions of sentiment compose to express opinions about different parts and features of things.  Jason is a PhD candidate in computer science at Indiana University, and has worked with J.D. Power and Associates and at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and is an adviser to Votizen.
	Alexandra Robertson, Data Analyst Alexandra brings a wide range of experience in content development, market research and affiliate marketing to PlaceIQ. Prior to coming to PlaceIQ, Alexandra has been involved in various entrepreneurial environments including PublicEarth, where she managed international research and content development. She has also utilized her organizational and research skills to perform international market analyses in affiliate marketing, study market segmentation in the automobile industry and conduct data analysis. Alexandra possesses a flair for creativity and a passion for knowledge, which define her role at PlaceIQ. Alexandra is a graduate of the University of Colorado with a Bachelor’s degree in History.
	George Figgs, Annotator George has performed linguistic data annotation and analysis for J.D. Power and Associates, Gracenote, and Rosetta Stone. He has a Master’s degree in linguistics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and has completed doctoral work in socio-cultural linguistics, cognitive science, and computational linguistics.

Board of Advisers

Marc Theermann Mobile media has been Marc’s life as an entrepreneur, investor, and senior operating executive for over ten years.  Today he is the VP Mobile at Admeld, one of the word’s largest Supply Side Platforms and Mobile Ad Exchanges. Prior to Admeld he incubated a mobile analytics and media buying dashboard concept at Polaris Ventures, which ultimately became part of Smaato Inc. In 2004, Mr. Theermann co-founded mobile application company Everypoint, where he assisted in raising $14 million in venture funding from three prominent investment firms. In 2000 he founded YellowPepper, one of the world’s first mobile marketing companies, which he later sold to a private equity firm. Mr. Theermann holds an MBA degree from Northeastern University, and a Masters in International Management from Thunderbird.

Investors

Jerry Neumann, Jim Pallotta, Stuart Davidson