Jiva Technology

Kevin Gibson Founder

Kevin spent time working in Silicon Valley and Australia before returning home to the UK in 2006, determined to start a successful technology based business in his hometown of Bristol.

His other business interests include a 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.  Kevin sits on the Board of Hanzo Archives, a web archiving and e-discovery company, as well as Business Fitness, a provider of systems and services to the Australian accounting industry.

Jon Ellis Co-Founder

Jon joined Jiva in 2006 after an eighteen year career at Lloyds Banking Group 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.

An accountant by training he brings a wealth of commercial and strategic experience to the business.

Pete Ferne Technical Director

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Stefan Goodchild Product Manager

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.

Jamie Dyer Developer

Jamie has over 9 years of development experience with languages such as Ruby, JavaScript and PHP. He also has extensive accessibility & usability experience, having been in charge of accessibility and usability for the University of Plymouth website. Jamie has been working as a freelance developer in Canada for the last three years and found Jiva when he moved back to the UK in 2008.

Jamie likes to contribute to the open source community whenever possible and has a number of projects available on github. He developed a JavaScript mocking library called jsMocha as well as the javascript_auto_include plug-in for Ruby on Rails, amongst other things.