Patrick Kennedy
CEO
Patrick Kennedy is a leader in digital media with extensive experience in technical product development and digital distribution, strategic planning and corporate development.
Prior to Sidebar, Patrick spent two years as a strategic advisor to the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA) where he helped position Singapore as a hub for digital content distribution across internet, mobile, and emerging distribution platforms. He was a founding member of the Singapore Digital Marketplace industry roundtable which helped to introduce new revenue models for broadband video in the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to this, Patrick was executive vice president at Sony Pictures Digital.
Patrick has keynoted at such events as CTIA Wireless and Milia and he is a founding member of Enterprise Ireland’s TIME advisory council. He is an active member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ Interactive Media Peer Group and a board member of the Mobile Entertainment Forum. He graduated summa cum laude from Milwaukee School of Engineering with a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering and received a National Science Foundation Fellowship for graduate work at Stanford University where he received a Master of Science and Ph.D. A.B.D. in electrical engineering.
Eric Wilson
CTO
As chief technology officer of Sidebar, Eric is responsible for all aspects of technology, including product development, infrastructure and deployment.
Eric is recognized for his technical and wireless data expertise having launched some of the most successful start ups for nearly two decades. Prior to Sidebar, Eric served as CTO for GoTV Networks, the first made-for-mobile video company, where he also developed corporate strategy and helped raise $12 million in venture capital funding from Bessemer and Venture Partners, Charles River Ventures, Motorola Ventures and Qualcomm Ventures. Prior to this, Eric was a founding team member and the vice president of infrastructure at JAMDAT Mobile (now EA Games). Eric helped the company become the leader in mobile games, leading to the company’s IPO in 2004 which was hailed as one of the year’s most successful public offerings. Before this, Eric co-founded and led the engineering efforts for Idealab’s MyHome.com, a home furnishings based e-commerce website, which was ultimately purchased for $45 million. Eric was also the founding engineer at CitySearch (NASDAQ: IACI) and was responsible for the architecture and development of all the corporate and distributed sales force automation systems.
Carl Kirchhoff
Vice President, Business Development
With more than 15 years assisting media, internet and telecommunication companies in Europe and the US, Carl has successfully built multi-platform content distribution agreements spanning the full distribution spectrum from TV, cable, internet, IPTV, broadband/cable and mobile. A former professional athlete, Carl’s career in sports marketing with T.E.A.M. Marketing saw him lead the UEFA Champions League media rights distribution and other premium properties worldwide. Understanding the dynamic development towards media and platform convergence, he was instrumental in developing the “rights window” concept now widely adopted by premium content rights holders.
Subsequently, he served as consultant and board advisor to leading mobile companies including MINICK (acquired by net mobile and NTT DoCoMo), 3United (acquired by VeriSign) and Mobile Streams (LSE: MOS) and has secured strategic content and carrier partnerships leading to successful mergers & acquisitions. Most recently, Carl was Vice President Sales & Marketing and Managing Director Americas at United Mobile, an Accel Partners funded mobile venture. Prior to this he served as Vice President Business Development & Sales/Chief Revenue Officer at Via One Corporation, a $380 million revenue mobile transaction and communications company operating out of nine offices in four continents.
Carl holds a Master of Business Administration from the University of Paderborn in Germany and is regular speaker at digital media events.
Srinivas Rao Doddi
Senior Scientist
Srinivas Doddi has spent the last 12 years as a scientist specializing in data mining, machine learning (ML), algorithms and data structures, computational modeling and combinatorial optimization. Over the years he has authored and issued numerous publications and patents and developed extensive experience in web analytics, behavior modeling, click fraud detection, and traffic quality prediction in online advertising. At Sidebar, Srinivas applies his wealth of experience against our most challenging problem domains and works with our ML and Metrics teams to keep Sidebar’s solutions at the forefront.
Before Sidebar, Srinivas served as senior research scientist at Click Forensics where he developed sophisticated computational models to detect click fraud and to predict low quality traffic for advertisers, ad networks and publishers. His work there resulted in two patents. Prior to this, Srinivas worked in the electronic design automation (EDA) and semiconductor industries where he extensively applied many data mining, machine learning and combinatorial optimization techniques to solve many critical problems. Srinivas was a senior member of the consulting staff at Cadence Design Systems where he led many core research projects in the design for manufacturing (DFM). He developed highly accurate fast models to predict topography of the wafer, to detect and fix hotspots and was involved in many cross functional groups. His work there resulted in several patents. Before this, Srinivas was a senior research scientist at Timbre/Tokyo Electron, (a successful startup company). There he led a team of scientists and developed a breakthrough technology in scatterometry which led to a number of patents. Srinivas began his career as a graduate research assistant at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Srinivas received Ph.D. in computer science from the University of New Mexico.
David Sogn
Director, Business Intelligence
David fulfills a critical role in the evolution of Sidebar’s business as well as our client’s success. As Director of Business Intelligence, he is completely immersed in our client’s data operations; analyzing the efficacy of our personalization solutions using a number of industry best practices and proprietary methodologies. David also works with clients to help identify and recommend opportunities to improve their businesses and help guide them to data analytics maturity.
Prior to Sidebar, David developed his expertise in financial strategy and analysis early in his career at one of the world’s leading financial firms, UBS AG. Over the next 7 years David honed his BI expertise in digital media strategy, web analytics and data mining at Microsoft and The Walt Disney Company. During this time, he designed and deployed world-class data warehouses and pioneered analytical models for user behavior and traffic for MSN, Hotmail, Bing and Xbox Live divisions as well as ABC, ESPN, Disney Online, Miramax and other key business units. He also contributed analysis for strategically important acquisitions such as Microsoft’s purchase of Yahoo’s search technology and in-game advertising company Massive, Inc. as well as Disney’s purchase of social gaming company Playdom, Inc.
David received his BA in International Business & Finance from Menlo College and his MA in Economic & Social History from Cambridge University.
Richard Skelton
Director, Product Development
Richard brings over 10 years of software, web, and mobile technology experience to Sidebar. As Director of Product Development, Richard serves many roles from ideation and product design, to partner service integration management. His efforts ensure that our partners receive maximum benefit from Sidebar’s suite of solutions both short and long term.
Prior to joining Sidebar, Richard accumulated valuable knowledge in the mobile industry serving as Manager of Software Quality Engineering at Helio, LLC where he was instrumental in the implementation of the quality assurance processes used across all company platform engineering initiatives. Richard also led a team of Quality Engineers and made valuable contributions to several award winning consumer security products while at Symantec Corporation.
Richard is a graduate of the University of Michigan with a BS in Computer Science.