Rajeev Chand has been named director of product development at Hark, the Seattle startup that distributes hundreds of thousands of sound clips from movies and TV shows. Chand, who will manage the Web site and user experience, worked at Microsoft on the Bing team. “I enjoy making beautiful products that matter,” says Chand. “I like working closely with both engineering and design, and am most excited by projects that touch a lot of people.”
Bill Neukom, the former chief counsel at Microsoft and part owner in the San Francisco Giants, has been named to the board of Sunnyvale, California network security company Fortinet. Neukom led Microsoft’s legal efforts during the antitrust era. “I am impressed with Fortinet’s success story so far — consistently innovating and delivering exceptional network security products,” said Neukom in a statement.
Thomas Enochs, a former technology executive at Azaleos, Globys and Qpass, has been named senior vice president of operations at Vertafore. He will report to the CEO and oversee all professional services, including data centers and customer service. He will also help the company push deeper into cloud computing and software-as-a-service. Enochs most recently served as a vice president at Azaleos, which was sold late last year to Accenture. Vertafore makes software for the insurance industry, and was recently named one of the fastest growing private companies in the region by Inc. magazine.
Blockbuster Chief Marketing Officer Kevin Lewis has joined the board of struggling Bellevue mobile software company Motricity. He replaces Lady Barbara Judge who resigned from her position as a director earlier this month. Lewis has served as CMO at Blockbuster since 2011, and before that worked for the company as vice president of digital entertainment. Blockbuster emerged from bankruptcy in March 2011 when it was sold to Dish Network.
Big Fish, the Seattle casual game maker, has promoted Will O’Brien to the postion of senior vice president of corporate and business development.
Volometrix has promoted Joel Grus — a former analyst at Decide.com and Farecast —to the positon of Chief Scientist. Grus is the author of a book on problem solving and data analysis in spreadsheets entitled Thinking Spreadsheet. He holds a Master’s degree in Economics from Caltech, a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Washington, and a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from Rice University. “It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a data scientist, particularly developing next generation solutions at VoloMetrix, where we’re working at the crossroads of Big Data and social analytics,” he said.
Intellectual Ventures has named Duke physicist David R. Smith to lead the patent holding company’s metamaterials commercialization efforts. Intellectual Ventures said that Smith is one of the senior inventors behind its portfolio of metamaterials inventions, including the satellite antenna technology which forms the backbone of Kymeta. Intellectual Ventures said that they will be looking for venture funding to support additional spin-out opportunities. He’s on sabbatical from Duke, and is serving at IV on an acting basis. “IV has begun hiring additional engineers and scientists to support this work and will expand our relationships with metamaterials researchers around the world,” the company wrote in a blog post.
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