Gareth Reakes's Email Addresses & Phone Numbers

📖 Summary

I have travelled an interesting journey over the last few years – from serial entrepreneur to working for the largest private employer in the UK. The thing that gets me out of bed in the morning is to build great products that customers love. My background is technical and all of my companies have been in the tech space. Tesco acquired the last, WE7, a music streaming service, in 2012. The current start up is called 3rings and its aim is to help families look after their ageing relatives. Getting some great early traction.Director, Founder @ 3rings allows ALL family members to instantly answer the question “How is my mum or dad doing today?” We take the traditional family idea of ’’call me and let it ring 3 times so I know you're OK” and bring it up to date for the Internet generation. We have the "3rings Plug" which sits behind a device like a kettle and reports whenever its turned on. A web interface lets you configure when you expect that to happen. For example, it could notify all your family if Nan has not made a cup of tea by 8am. 1 member of the family can then check on Mum/Nan. Check out the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8kLBCK_Xeg From May 2013 to Present (2 years 8 months) Oxford, United KingdomGroup Digital Product Director @ Group Digital Product is about creating amazing products for customers and colleagues. We take the most important areas and put a world-class product process around them. We are data driven and customer focused in everything we do. Right now, the verticals in GDP are: - Clubcard (loyalty scheme with 45 million members globally) - Connected Products (Hudl tablet) - International Grocery Home Shopping - Product Data We also have a practice area that helps out around the business and aims to create communities of practice in the product disciplines to drive forward the adoption of data driven, customer focused, multichannel vision. From January 2014 to Present (2 years) London, United KingdomMember @ I was elected a committer for Xerces (the suite of XML parsers) during 2002 while Xerces was still part of the XML Project. In 2003 I was elected to the XML Project Management Committee (PMC). Xerces became a top level project in its own right in 2005 and I was elected Chair of the PMC (and therefore VP of Apache). I stepped down in 2009 although am still a member of the PMC. In 2009 I was elected to become a member of Apache (http://apache.org/foundation/members.html) In 2011 I became a member of the Xalan PMC with the aim of increasing participation in the project. Steven Hathaway was recently elected chair and is doing a great job reinvigorating Xalan. From March 2005 to Present (10 years 10 months) Technical Product Director @ I lead a project that looked at how Tesco approached developing digital products across the whole estate. The aims were to evaluate the current state of play and evangelise industry best practice product management practices. From May 2013 to December 2013 (8 months) Member @ The IAB Audio Council's three key aims are: · To further educate the market; · To help develop the future business models of the audio sector; · To increase the value of the online audio advertising sector. From April 2013 to December 2013 (9 months) London, United KingdomCTO @ Post acquisition we are underwent a rapid expansion phase. I was tasked with ensuring that the quality of the team we built remains world class and be able to deliver fantastic new product in 2013. From June 2012 to June 2013 (1 year 1 month) Speaker @ I have spoken on a variety of advertising and monetisation topics and issues. From January 2010 to January 2013 (3 years 1 month) London, United KingdomCTO, Founder @ WE7 was an online music streaming service that I founded in 2006 with John Taysom. Throughout the life of WE7 I was involved in all areas of the company. I led the product and technology roadmaps and formed part of the core team that set strategy. I was also directly involved with all aspects of the daily operations of the business including the successful raise of 4 rounds of funding from a variety of sources including VCs and High Net Worth individuals. At our peak, WE7 reached 3 million monthly uniques using the web site, widgets and mobile apps prior to the recent acquisition of Tesco. From December 2006 to June 2012 (5 years 7 months) Member of Advisory Panel for the Software Engineering Programme @ The role of the Panel is to provide advice on the development of the Programme, from an industrial perspective. From 2005 to 2010 (5 years) CEO, Founder @ John Merrells and I founded Embrace Mobile with the fashionable concept of "optimising transactions using mobile". We funded it with the money generated from Parthenon Computing. Our first product was in the market research area where we built a platform that removed the complexities of communicating to any mobile devices. We had deals with some major survey providers including Nebu and Confirmit. We did business across Europe and the US. The technology was really interesting but it was a couple of years too early. From December 2005 to 2007 (2 years) CEO, Founder @ John Merrells and I founded Parthenon with the aim of providing tech services to "inventors, investors and entrepreneurs". We helped out from the business plan/pitch stage of an idea through to post funding. We provided a wide variety of services to companies - from some consultancy through to executing CTO and the full team in our offices. We grew the company to 10+ people over the first 2 years working for companies such as Secerno (acquired by Oracle), Sleepycat DBXML (acquired by Oracle), CSW, Ubic and many others. It was an interesting company and it was very rewarding to set it up from scratch but we were never going to set the world alight with a consultancy company so we decided to take the profits and invest them in a product company called Embrace Mobile From December 2003 to 2006 (3 years) Oxford, United KingdomReviewer, Session Chair and Speaker @ Peer reviewed and graded submissions to both the European and American IDE Alliance XML conferences. I regularly chaired sessions at these events. In addition, I presented a variety of talks including: 2004 - DOM, SAX and Standards - Where Now?, XML 2004, Washington 2003 - XML Validation - Where and How, XML 2003, Philadelphia 2003 - Business Rules Validation - the Standard the W3C Forgot, XML Europe 2003, London From 2003 to 2006 (3 years) Head of Product Development @ I joined Decisionsoft from university when it was less that 10 people. I grew with the company and progressed to heading up the development side of the company. We did many interesting and cutting edge projects in the XML space. We developed our own XML processing language (before XSLT existed / was widely adopted). We worked many small and large organisations and governments. We were involved from the very early days in XBRL and that's where the organisation (now CoreFiling) focuses. From October 1999 to January 2004 (4 years 4 months) Oxford, United KingdomTechnical Reviewer @ Reviewed a series of books ensuring that the contents were technically correct. Books included: Beginning XML Professional XML Development with Apache Tools: Xerces, Xalan, FOP, Cocoon, Axis, Xindice Professional XML (2nd edition) Professional Web Services From 2001 to 2004 (3 years) BSc, Computer Science, 1st class honours @ Oxford Brookes University From 1998 to 2000 Gareth Reakes is skilled in: Team Building, Mobile Devices, XML, Databases, Entrepreneurship, Agile Methodologies, Product Management, Software Development, Business Strategy, Product Development, Software Engineering, Business Development, XSLT, Apache, SaaS