About
Jiva Technology started out as a group of what used to be called 'seasoned professionals'; people for whom the mainstream was no longer enough. Our challenge is to build a company that is creative and practical, but above all, useful. And be friendly to the people that work there, including us. By happy coincidence, we share enough common beliefs to be able to work together. We believe that creative ideas are good but making them work is a whole lot better (and harder). We also believe in good engineering. It may have played ugly sister to design for a long time now, but you need both if you want to go to the ball. Oh, and life is too short to not give something back.
You may have realised by now that we've spent way too much time working in America. But there is one thing we don't mind admitting that we share with our North Atlantic cousins: enthusiasm for what we do. Our goal is to apply some of the latest and most creative new software technologies to some of life's oldest and knottiest problems; the ones that don't get picked for the X-Factor.
And we've started with education.
The Team
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Kevin Gibson Chief Executive Officer
He spent many years globe-trotting, including time spent working in the Silicon Valley, UK and Australia. He returned back home to the UK in 2006, determined to start a technology based business in his hometown of Bristol.
Kevin is a serial entrepreneur, whose other business interests include his privately held commercial property company, and Ebooks Corporation — an Australia based world leader in digital book technology, where he is a leading shareholder and Chairman. In part his business interests are an extension of his affinity for good quality design and engineering.
Previously SVP, Europe, Middle East & Africa for Ariba Inc, a US based e-commerce company, which he joined following a ten year career at SAP AG, where he held various executive positions, culminating in Managing Director UK & Ireland.
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Jon Ellis Chief Operating Officer
Jon has a broad range of commercial and operational experience in retail financial services. He spent eighteen years at Lloyds TSB plc, where he undertook a series of executive roles, most notably heading the finance department for the bank's nationwide network of 2,000 high street branches. Other key roles include heading the finance teams for product/customer offer development and financial management information. He was also part of the team that set up Goldfish Bank.
Jon firmly believes in social entrepreneurship. As a parent, he sees education as a great place to start, as it's an area where business-led innovation can make a positive contribution to the development of children.
He is a keen supporter of Bristol Rugby, and he enjoys local produce from the West Country — mostly cider and pasties.
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Pete Ferne Chief Technical Officer
Pete is a technical director, software architect and developer with nineteen years experience in the IT and Digital Media industries. He has a strong background in the introduction and management of best practice in the software development and digital content production processes, with a recent focus on agile approaches and evolutionary delivery.
His experience spans a wide range from safety critical computing through distributed systems, large scale web applications and mobile devices for everyone from blue chip corporations and high profile startups to research labs.
In the last few years he has become particularly interested in the ability of various forms of social software to enhance the ways in which people experience and interact with their environment and with each other, in both physical and digital public spaces.
Pete is a passionate social entrepreneur who chairs Bristol Wireless a community co-operative which works to bring computers, connectivity, open source software and the skills to use them to all sections of society. He believes that connectivity is the lifeblood of co-operation.
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Peter Brown Chairman
Peter Brown is a knowledgeable independent chairman and non-executive director with experience of both large and small public limited companies, private companies and not-for-profit organisations. He specialises in improving value through re-structuring, strategic planning, mergers, divestment, flotation and targeted remuneration systems.
With the help of partners and excellent executive teams he has founded, developed from scratch, and in some cases sold, six successful groups, and one unsuccessful one.
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Matt Jukes Product Manager
Matt has spent the majority of the last decade managing websites and digital communications for education and research organisations including the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC).
He was responsible for identifying and implementing a number of social web communications channels to JISC — including blogs, wikis, pocasts and live video streaming of events; and at HEFCE he was managing a project on behalf of HEFCE and the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills to improve the quality of the content and usability of the higher education offering on the Directgov portal.
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Theo Cushion Developer
Theo is a graduate in Electronic Engineering from Southampton University. Whilst at Southampton Theo started working on embedded platforms for Philips Semiconductors where he became interested in developing interactive television. He discovered Ruby on Rails when building web applications for Krystal Hosting and found the convention over configuration a breath of fresh air.
He was attracted to Jiva by the company's commitment to explore and develop the internet's potential to promote education and social interaction. At the moment he is responsible for keeping Beanbag moving through the development cycle, improving it and adding extra features.
Theo is also very happy to be working for a West Country firm; born and educated in Cornwall Theo likes to power kite when out of the office.
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Ed Davey Developer
Ed has technical and management experience with range of start-ups ranging from 'pure play' web startups to niche catering ventures.
He has been around web development since the mid nineties when he set up the technical department at Syzygy and helped build that business up to float on Frankfurt's Neuer Markt in 2000. After Syzygy Ed was a founder of the now defunct antiques web business Cloudband.com in 1999 which was ahead of its time in providing full trading services to the carpet, textile, Asian and tribal arts niches.
Whilst Web 2.0 was sneaking up on us Ed spent several years in the catering trade, setting up businesses including a traveling restaurant for the chic West Country circus Giffords and an airline catering venture supplying luxury terrines and pates to British Airways' First and Club menus.
Agile development techniques and the Ruby on Rails framework gave Ed the impetus to return to web development in 2006, doing freelance development as well as setting up Paperfly a joint venture with stylish design company Roger La Borde. Ed and family moved to Bristol early in spring 2008.
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Stefan Goodchild Developer
Stefan is an interaction designer and developer specializing in user interface design and interaction technologies with 14 years working in the IT field, initially as 2nd line technical support for international corporations before moving over into the design and interaction fields ten years ago with 6 years under his belt at Peter Gabriel's Real World Multimedia.
He has worked on a number of interactive projects over a range of technologies including Web, Video, DVDs, CDROM and Mobile including products for Peter Gabriel, WOMAD, Real World, Hector Zazou, @Bristol, BT and Sendo among others.
He has a passion for usability and interaction design and pairs that with an equal passion for technology and code and finds the point at which the two intersect fascinating and frustrating in equal measure. He is particularly interested in how people use technology to interact with each other and creates systems that build communities, with a focus on researching and applying appropriate technology to create highly usable designs that are both easy to use and lovely to look at.
We wouldn't have got far without the help of some other talented individuals who have been working with us to turn our ideas into reality.
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Sean Ingram
Sean is a specialist in brand development, value proposition design, client experience delivery and marketing communications across multiple markets, products, channels and client segments. He has proven ability of working at a senior level with large organisations, including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Visa Europe and American Express, in developing strategic marketing programmes.
He started and sold a successful communications agency with an annual income of £5m p.a. and 60 employees that was voted 'Young Agency of the Year' by Campaign Magazine in 2000 and won blue chip accounts worth over $18m.
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Chris Berridge
Chris is an art director and interaction designer with 12 years experience in the IT and Digital Media industries, during which time he has worked on and coordinated successful interactive projects for clients including the BBC, Redken, The Welsh Assembly, Panasonic and Proctor & Gamble.
Chris is a passionate advocate of usability oriented design, and has been featured in a number of industry publications and websites including .net magazine.
Chris is a partner in Block Interactive and has been the lead designer for Beanbag and continues to contribute to its evolution.
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Tom Locke
Having circled the globe (living in Boston, then Bangalore) in search of the American Start-Up Dream, he is now nestled back at home in rural Warwickshire with his wife and two daughters, and deeply immersed in the development of both Hobo and Beanbag.
Tom is the father of the Hobo project and a freelance web-developer and technical trainer, specialising in Ruby on Rails. He has been working exclusively on custom Rails application development for the last two years and has built many sites both small and large. Having a fanatical aversion to repeating himself, he has extracted the Hobo framework from these projects. The code-base for each successive project gets smaller as Hobo gets better!
Hobo is the 'secret sauce' which is enabling us to build Beanbag super fast and super flexibly.
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James Garlick
James is a freelance web developer and a member of the core Hobo team. With a background in software engineering he caught the web development bug after discovering Ruby on Rails in 2006. Since then he has built a wide range of small and large sites, specializing in e-commerce. James has a rare combination of strong technical skills and a passion for design and usability.
James is working hand-in-hand with Tom making sure that Beanbag sits comfortably atop the Hobo framework, and makes the most of it.
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Dan Dixon
Dan Dixon is a Senior Lecturer at the University of the West of England, but has 10 years of commercial web design and development experience. His main interest is around designing holistic services that make the best of the social aspects of shared use.
At UWE he runs an undergraduate degree in web design and development as well as carrying out research and consultancy in this area. His current focuses are around online social spaces, service design, pervasive media and interesting games.
Prior to moving to academia he had roles as a senior consultant with Headshift, a leading social software company, product manager for the BBC's online communities and production director for new media agency Syzygy.
Dan worked with us to help us define our 'social architecture' and to develop our initial product roadmap.
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Ed Mitchell
Ed is a professional community advisor and online and offline facilitator. He is particularly keen on helping groups of people to share knowledge among themselves. He helps organisations to optimise their use of technology to forge close relationships between their members and with related groups.
Ed was previously the Editor of the EC research network KnowledgeBoard, the largest Knowledge Managment community in the world with 13,000 members spread across nine different language zones and twenty international Communities of Practice. It also hosts a massive collection of research papers from members and peer-reviewed journals.
Ed worked with us to help us define our 'social architecture' and to develop our community engagement strategy.
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Jo Haywood
With 15 years of experience making broadcast and corporate videos, Jo Haywood set up Skylark Films in 2005. The company specialises in corporate and educational films.
Jo began her career making The Sunday Times business training series before spending some time in Hollywood working as a journalist for a news radio station on Sunset Boulevard. On returning to the UK she moved into broadcast television, producing science documentaries for BBC 2, Channel 4 and Discovery Channel. The most challenging series was Stephen Hawking's Universe, 6 x 1 hour programmes on the origins of time. Jo joined BBC Bristol in 1999 in the evolving interactive department. Here she was responsible for the development of the lifestyle websites; gardening, food, homes and antiques and became a pioneer in the early days of interactive TV.
It's been really interesting and great fun working with teachers Jennifer and Mark to produce the first podcasts for Beanbag. I hope that you find them useful.
Jo Haywood
