We’re in a phase of rapid growth at the Symbian Foundation: it seems that, every week, another 5-10 people start work with us.
Some of the employees here have a long shared history of working together. I can count three who, in the latter part of 1995, nearly fourteen years ago, all had seats on the 1st floor of Sentinel House – the building on the corner of Harcourt Street and Old Marylebone Road that was used by Psion for many years:
- John Forsyth, who is now our Leadership Team member responsible for Technology Management
- Ian Hutton, who is now Roadmap Manager in our Technology Management team, and chair of the Symbian Feature & Roadmap Council;
- myself, David Wood.
But alongside this strand of Psion old-timers (as well as many others who joined Symbian Software Ltd over the years), we’re hiring many people into the Symbian Foundation who have very different backgrounds, and who bring a highly valuable mix of experience into the organisation. Here are just a few examples:
- Dietmar Tallroth recently joined as our General Counsel; previously he was Director, Legal for Open Source and Java at Nokia – where he served on Committee B of the Free Software Foundation initiative to create GPL and LGPL Version 3;
- Oliver Gunasekara recently joined our Alliance Management team; his background includes 12 years at ARM, working in roles all over the world;
- Daniel Rubio recently joined as our Chief Architect, and chairs the Symbian Architecture Council; Daniel previously worked at Sendo, NEC, and Motorola;
- Robert Ackland recently joined as our Technology Manager for “Application and UI” layer technologies; Robert previously worked at Panasonic and Motorola;
- Maurice Sharp recently joined as our Developer Community Manager, from a background that includes Intuit, AOL, Palm, and Apple;
- Lauren Sarno recently joined our Member Programs team; Lauren was previously Marketing Communications Manager at ARM.
I feel honoured to be working alongside so many first-class colleagues.
PS Watch this space for more announcements!
Congratulations to everyone who got hired! Hope to see more awesome things coming out of Symbian in the future.
Thanks for the update. It would be great to see a similar profile (and perhaps their own opinion of what their job entails) up on the website.
Personally I’m particularly interested in the vision Mr Sharp has with building up a world class development community. I very much look forward to hearing more from him.
It’s cool you guys do present yourselves and your team colleagues, it’s not usual on a blog or not, and it turns us closer to you all. It seems that we all are colleagues.
Thanks for the good wishes. I really like David Durant’s idea of having the staff post our responsibilities on the Web site — makes it very easy for people to find the right contact in Symbian. I’ll take that up with the Web team.
I’ll start here for now: I’m Member Programs, which breaks out into all aspects of member acquisition as well as creating and maintaining member programs. I’m assisted by the incredbly able Roelof Kotze (Member Administration), who is often the first contact a member has with Symbian. Any question about the membership application process can be resolved by Roelof.
And we ARE all colleagues, Carlos! As a team of two, Roelof and I can’t possibly manage all the co-marketing programs we are going to implement. Members will have to step forward and say, “I’ll take that one on.”
There is an exact analogy between how Symbian relates to the platform and how we relate to member programs. For the platform, we don’t develop; we give developers tools and resources, test for compatibility, and codeline manage — the members develop. Similarly, with input from members, we are aiming to create the highest value programs possible for members, but members will eventually own those programs.
Looks like an excellent team.
Good luck guys (you are going to need it).
I remember Sentinel House very well. Good Japanes around the corner in a basement.
In 1995 I had just joined ARM and was working to make sure a new PDA (Psion Series 5) used the lattest ARM CPU. An ARM7! A few years latter I setup a meet for Psion Software to demo EPOC32 to Nokia for the 1st time…