—Loreen Milbrath, a former finance exec at Swype, Melodeo and Tegic, has been named Chief Financial Officer at Flowboard. Milbrath most recently served as CFO at Swype, the mobile text-input technology maker that was sold to Nuance for more than $100 million in October 2011.
“Loreen is well-respected in the field, and it’s a pleasure to welcome her to the Flowboard family,” said Brent Brookler, Chief Executive Officer of Flowboard. “Her vast experience in early stage technology businesses helps ensure that we’ll have the right financial controls in place to support our growth and innovations in new product offerings that will dramatically increase our customer base in a financially scalable way.”
Flowboard is a maker of presentation software, which you may recall got into the trademark infringement fight with Flipboard a couple months ago. Flowboard is backed by angel investors Mike McSherry; Geoff Entress and others.
—Speaking of former Swype employees, Brian Resnik has joined Indix as community manager. At Swype, Resnik served as community relations specialist and beta manager. “My job is to create and maintain open dialogue with our community, at all levels,” said Resnik in a Q&A on the Indix site. “From customer support to webinars, meetups to video blogs, my goal is to make sure that there is an open, friendly, and constructive community where people can talk about product intelligence, product data science, the future of e-commerce and anything else of interest to the community.” Led by former Microsoft vice president Sanjay Parthasarathy, Indix, which helps companies utilize analytics, has raised about $6 million in venture funding from Avalon Ventures, Nexus Ventures and others.
—Digital media veteran Jenny Kuglin, the former General Manager of Content and Social Media at Fisher Interactive, has joined the management team at SocialNewsDesk as Director of Customer Relationships. More than 600 newsrooms are currently using SocialNewsDesk’s technology to manage, moderate and monetize social media. “Jenny is a perfect fit because, like us, Jenny understands how newsrooms operate. We’re really looking forward to putting Jenny’s experience to work for our customers,” said SocialNewsDesk Founder Kim Wilson.
—Former Microsoft executive Mark Relph has joined the B.C.-based tech accelerator GrowLab where he will serve as an entrepreneur-in-residence. “There are great things happening in Vancouver and I am honoured to be joining the outstanding team at GrowLab. I’m excited to offer my experience and passion for technology to help the Growlab companies be amazing,” said Relph in a blog post. Relph spent 15 years at Microsoft, most recently as Senior Director of Venture Capital Business Development.
—Skytap, the venture-backed Seattle startup that helps businesses create create complex computing environments in the cloud, has named Brian Barry as vice president of sales. Barry most recently served as area VP of enterprise software sales at H-P, and before that worked at CA Technologies, Planview, Mirror Image Internet, Pacific Edge Software, and Packet Engines Networking.
—Storage giant EMC/Isilon has hired Barbara Gordon — former head of Microsoft’s global Customer Services and Support organization — and Phil Bullinger — former SVP of Storage at Oracle. Gordon joins as chief operating officer, while Bullinger will serve in the role of senior vice president of engineering. EMC employs more than 60,000 employees worldwide, and it has a growing presence in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood through its 2010 acquisition of Isilon.
—Tom Donlea has joined WhitePages as director of risk services. In the new role, Donlea will help drive the growth and development of the WhitePages PRO platform for businesses and its fraud prevention products. Most recently he served as managing director, Americas, for the Merchant Risk Council (MRC). “Tom provides the industry know-how and expertise to help us innovate on our products and deliver unique value to current and prospective customers,” said WhitePages CEO Alex Algard in a statement.
—Charlie Tillinghast, the former CEO of MSNBC.com and a board member at Seattle startup Mixpo, has joined London-based Friend Media Technology Systems as CEO.
—Barry Lynn has been named chairman of the board of Blab, a maker of predictive social intelligence software to help monitor and predict social media conversations. “Barry’s track record of successfully introducing new technologies to market, most recently with cloud computing pioneer 3Tera, makes him the perfect leader to help take on the tremendous market opportunity for Predictive Social Intelligence,” said CEO Randy Browning. “I’m excited to have him as a chairman as we work to revolutionize the way businesses leverage real-time big data analytics in social conversations for influence and growth.” Lynn is the former CEO of 3Tera and Be eXcel. He’s also the former CIO of Wells Fargo.
—Enterprise software startup Usermind has named Steven Neuman as director of user experience. Neuman previously served as the lead designer at Yabbly the product decision-making company that he co-founded with Tom Leung. Before that, he worked as a designer for Übermind, which was acquired by Deloitte in 2012.
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