It's fair to say we're growing quickly here at Federated - in the past month or so four great people have joined our ranks, and we're still looking for more. Those joining the team include Celeste Chin, who I worked with way back when at Wired. Celeste was in finance at Wired, and I was managing editor. That meant she had to deal with all the nutty contracts and payment deals I struck with authors back before anyone really understood what "digital rights" was really all about. She was a great colleague then, and now, as FM's controller, she's once again breaking new ground in helping us take care of authors. And, by the way, she's an accomplished painter as well.
The tech team is growing as well. Justin Watt joins us as an Author Services Engineer. In 2005 Justin packed up his things in North Carolina and headed west. He had lived there for seven years, six of which he spent at UNC Chapel Hill earning two degrees, finishing with a Masters of Science in Information Science. Both during and after school he did database work for an international health project that sent him to countries as far flung as Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Tanzania, and Ghana. Before joining Federated Media, he worked on syndication and blogging technologies at O'Reilly Media, Inc. You can read about Justin's adventures in Northern California on his personal blog, justinsomnia.org. Here's his post about joining FM....
User Interface Engineer Andy Yang joins us from the user experience group at Genentech Inc. With his background in human-computer interaction, he is focused on interaction design, usability, and user research. He's focused on rev'ing our author platform right now, and yes, his brother is Dennis, one of the folks behind FM site TechDirt. Check out Andy's personal site at http://www.yizzle.com.
Our latest addition in our growing sales group is James Gross, who joins us from Feedster as an account executive. James has extensive sales and business development experience, and he writes a great blog as well (jamesgross.com). I agree with his recent post, we really do need a Peets in Sausalito. Let's start a petition....
