Sam Griffith Jr

— CEO and Founder

Sam Griffith Jr. founded IWS to focus on the bridging of mobile and cloud spaces to create tools and solutions that empower. Sams vision for IWS is that of utilizing the cloud (the network is the computer) and touch & voice based capabilities of today’s mobile devices to enable a set of solutions that were heretofore unable to be fully envisioned let alone be implemented. Todays mobile devices are yesterdays supercomputers, today’s clouds are essentially unbounded computational and storage devices fronted by mobile devices in a realtime data dance unknown before. Sams vision for what is possible when combining that power with individual and enterprise needs helped push him to start IWS.

Prior to starting IWS, Sam was the former director of Development and Technology at mobile developer Appiction.com having grown Appiction’s development team from 1 to 19 people and helping to deliver many applications into the Apple and Android App Stores for clients as diverse as Samsung, Jameson, IBM and others.

Before the mobile world took off like a rocket, after the iPhone introduction, Sam worked as a full-time employee in the late 80′s and early 90′s as a NeXTStep and Smalltalk developer. He was lucky enough to be one of the first developers trained on NeXTStep development at NeXT headquarters and had his brush with Steve Jobs at dinner with him during that time. Sam never thought he’d be using the same technology stack 20 years later on a device 1000′s of times more capable but a fraction of the size. Around ’93 Sam dove into consulting for many fortune 500 clients including Booz, Allen & Hamilton, DSC, Nortel, HBOC, Sprint, Capital One, PanCanadian Petroleum and others. He also had a successful web business in the mid/late-90′s creating early web applications to do sales automation, resource planning and telecom systems configuration. That same business participated in Microsoft’s rollout of it’s first e-commerce version of MS Site Server. Early work with server-side JavaScript on Netscape Server is now seeing it’s grandchildren in the form of Node.js. Sam considers himself lucky but also thinks his best accomplishment is being a dad to a great 13 year old son, who gets to see all the power Sam dreamed of back in the 80′s usable in the phone and tablet devices of today. Amazing!

Sam served as an Adjunct Professor at Southern Methodist University teaching Java. Sam has also presented on various topics at conferences and user groups.

Sam is a co-author of two books:  O’Reilly’s JBoss:  A Developers Notebook and currently working on one for Addison-Wesley related to iPhone development. His work with early Java in the mid-90′s is also a reference project for early Java work in the book Surviving Object-Oriented Projects by Alistair Cockburn.

Andrea Bertone

— SVP and Chief Marketing Officer

A metrics-driven marketing professional with a focus on optimization, conversion, retention and analytics, Andrea is passionate about making complex analytical information understandable and actionable to every employee in an organization. Andrea has specialized in SEO, web analytics and online marketing for over a decade working in Fortune 500 to small business and everywhere in between.

Andrea is a Google Analytics Certified Individual, expert in Omniture SiteCatalyst and has participated in IBM Coremetrics’ technical advisory board. In addition to being a speaker at eMetrics and SMX, she manages the Austin Web Analytics Wednesday group and is an active member of the thriving web analytics community in Austin, TX.

Steven Schroeder

— Mobile Wizard

Schroeder began programming C++ as a sophomore in high school, where he quickly worked his way up to head of the class. Since then he’s acquired a Bachelors degree in Computer Science, and is currently wrapping up a Masters degree in Software Engineering. His work has ranged across Java and J2EE, Android, C# and .NET 3.5 and 4 on Windows and Windows Phone. Lately, he’s branched out to the Apple side by learning iPhone development and Objective-C. We call him a Mobile Wizard because he is now a force to be reckoned with for all smartphone development, and is always eager to learn new technologies. In fact, that’s what brought him to IWS – every day here is something new.

Kevin Wittkopf

— Senior Mobile Integration Specialist

Kevin has over 20 years experience in software, spanning a broad array of technologies (C/C++, graphics, music/MIDI, Objective-C/NeXTStep, Java/J2EE, C#/.NET, Windows Phone 7, etc) and roles (developer, architect, team lead, OOA/OOD mentor, solutions architect, technical evangelist, author/presenter) at companies ranging from Microsoft, InLine Software, Pan Canadian Petroleum, Fannie Mae, British Columbia Institute of Technology and many others.

Kevin has led several project teams developing a variety of apps (thick client, and web, SOA) on J2EE, .NET, NeXTStep/Objective-C, and C++/C/MFC. I’ve also done a lot of consulting and partner technical activities such as mentoring folks in OOA/OOD, UML/RUP, Agile, etc

Kevin has been instrumentally involved in startups, and did a number of projects individually or as part of a small team.

Kevin has also presented technical sessions at many events including Autodesk University, JavaOne, Siemens PLM World, Microsoft Professional Developers Conference, TechEd, etc.

Kevin is co-author of the book ‘J2EE Anti-Patterns’ published by Wiley Press.

Kevin is currently working on a Windows Phone 7 music application that he is super excited about.

Norman Richards

— Systems Guru

Norman Richards is very detail oriented and thorough. He has worked on many open source projects including the JBoss application server, JBoss SEAM as a core team member and several others. Norman is the author of multiple books covering JBoss (one with Sam Griffith), XDoclet and several magazine and online articles covering J2EE development. Norman frequently gives technical talks to various groups. He is a proud graduate of the University of Texas and enjoys playing Go.