Kwin Hultman Kramer

Co-founder

2016 - Current

Daily is real-time video for developers. Our APIs make it fast and flexible to add video calls to any product.

Member of the Board of Directors

2015

Member of the Board of Directors

2014 - 2016

Entrepreneur in Residence

2014 - 2016

Chief Haskell Officer

2014 - 2015

Hacking, reading books, camping on beaches with no cell phone coverage.

CEO

2005 - 2013

Kwin moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to help create Oblong and served as the company's CEO from its founding through 2013. He played a hands-on role in building out Oblong's core technology platform, then led the company through a commercial expansion and major product launch. Kwin built relationships with flagship customers including Boeing, Saudi Aramco, and GE. He personally booked Oblong's first $20M in revenue. As a co-founder, Kwin played a hands-on engineering role early on, then focused on business development and strategy as the company grew. Under Kwin's leadership, Oblong scaled up from two employees to 80, developed a reputation as a leader in new computing interfaces, and built an enterprise technology product with strong traction in the high-end marketplace. Highlights: • Kwin co-led engineering work on g-speak, Oblong's spatial, multi-screen development platform. g-speak is many tens of thousands of lines of C and C++ code, plus bindings for Ruby, Java, Scheme, and JavaScript. • Oblong treated engineering hiring as a critical competitive advantage. Kwin managed and "owned" the hiring process for the first 30 (approximately) of the company's engineers. • Oblong's early customers were Fortune 500 companies with "big data" challenges. Kwin "owned" these services-heavy customer relationships for Oblong's first few years, spending as many as 100 days a year onsite with customers, potential customers, and industry partners. • Kwin initiated Oblong's shift from a services-oriented business model to a company that focused on repeatably selling product. Kwin identified a large market opportunity (multi-screen collaboration in corporate conference rooms, meeting rooms, and team spaces) and led product design and early customer iteration. • As Oblong's product business scaled up, Kwin hired a senior management team (CFO, VP of Sales, VP of Business Development) with the experience to grow Oblong's top-line revenues, leverage partnerships, and manage growth.

CTO

1999 - 2006

AllAfrica Global Media is a multi-media content service provider, systems technology developer and the largest electronic distributor of African news and information worldwide. Registered in Mauritius, with offices in Johannesburg, Dakar, Lagos and Washington, D.C., AllAfrica is one of a family of companies that aggregate, produce and distribute news from across Africa to tens of millions of end users. Kwin was the founding CTO of AllAfrica and remains on the company's board of directors. Highlights: • Working with a small team of programmers, Kwin built out a content management system, custom editorial tools, systems back end, and web front end capable of handling a news feed of several thousand stories a day, distribution to multiple electronic content networks, and millions of web visitors per month. • AllAfrica was one of the first major commercial internet operations built entirely on top of Open Source Software. AllAfrica's Perl-based web framework, XML::Comma, was open sourced and became the core of a number of other large web operations in the early 2000s. Kwin was the architect of XML::Comma. • Kwin traveled extensively in Africa and Europe, advocating for Open Source technology investment by governments and aid organizations, and training developers, journalists, and civil society partners.

Consulting CTO

2003 - 2004

Media Matters for America is a web-based, not-for-profit, progressive research and information center. On a leave from AllAfrica, Kwin led the technology effort during the Media Matters for America launch period, building a web and editorial workflow system, plus what was at the time the world’s largest broadcast video recording, archiving, and excerpting system. Highlights: • Media Matters "borrowed" Kwin and part of the AllAfrica tech team to get up and running. Kwin designed a content management system, web front end, and large-scale television monitoring system for MMFA, then led the build-out of those systems. The content and web systems were fairly standard, built on top of Kwin's Open Source XML::Comma framework. The television monitoring system was a new challenge, initially consisting of a network of more than 20 Tivo boxes with modified linux kernels.

Consulting Technology Architect

2001 - 2002

By 2001, AllAfrica had developed a reputation as a leading developer of internet and content technologies. This reputation allowed AllAfrica to selectively accept technology consulting and implementation contracts from leading media organizations, civil society groups, and governmental organizations. The largest of these contracts was with the Democratic National Committee in 2001 and 2002. The DNC hired AllAfrica in late-2001 to rebuild the organization's technology operation from scratch. AllAfrica delivered a new and vastly expanded web site, a scalable payment processing back end, and a content marketing system that integrated with the DNC's various data and marketing services providers. This multi-million dollar technology stack was delivered on time and on budget. Highlights: • In consultation with stakeholders from the DNC and DNC partners, Kwin designed a full stack of new web-era technologies for the DNC. This turned out to be the first fully integrated tech stack deployed by any national political organization (including web, email, content marketing, and direct online credit card processing for contributors). • Kwin's team at AllAfrica worked with teams from the DNC and from DNC partners to deliver the full technology stack in time for the 2002 mid-term elections. Kwin managed a team of approximately 20 developers and consultants on a highly compressed nine month schedule. • The web systems that AllAfrica built for the DNC remained in place through the 2004 election cycle, handling millions of unique users per week during peak periods and ultimately processing hundreds of millions of dollars of credit card transactions.