The Magnify.net Team

Steve Rosenbaum, Founder and CEO

I was a magician in high school, and I always loved the back and forth with the audience. The feedback. When I started working in the media, I found the whole 'one way' thing kind of hollow. I wanted applause if we did well and I wanted rotten fruit if the audience didn't like a documentary or program we produced.

At the first chance I got, I invented a TV series that gave the audience a chance to do more than watch -- but actually participate. It was called MTV UNfiltered, and if you haven't checked it out, you can find it here.

Along the way, I've made a ton of films, documentaries, and web projects for partners including HBO, Discovery, A&E, MSNBC, and CNN. I've also directed a number of feature documentaries, including a film I'm very proud of "7 Days in September" about how New York was affected by the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Magnify.net is the incarnation of the way I see the media world evolving. Increasingly, the power is in the hands of the audience. The audience engages, shares, ranks, and validates. I always imagined Magnify.net as a platform that would engage, embrace, and facilitate media creating, sharing, and collective knowledge. I'm passionate about the sounds and pictures that real people create, and excited to help create order from chaos.

Simon Cavalletto, Founder and CTO

I've been a computer geek for as long as I can remember -- I started programming early one childhood Christmas morning after we unwrapped our family's first Apple computer, and I've never looked back (although thankfully I've moved on from Basic).

For more than a decade, I've specialized in building database-driven web applications using open-source frameworks. With the help of a small technical team, I led development projects for a long series of clients, including engagements building publishing sites for Nature Magazine's monthly journals, an intranet software package for the idealab! incubator, e-commerce sites for Bluefly.com and Eyeglasses.com, and medical records databases for Columbia Presbyterian Hospital.

For me, Magnify.net represents an opportunity to go beyond helping one organization at a time, by delivering a platform that makes it simple for thousands of people to create and customize their own Internet video solutions.

Alan Medvin, VP, Operations and Strategy

For as long as I can remember my favorite board game has been Monopoly. As a child, the development of a strategy to control as many properties as possible was both fascinating and a great challenge. Somewhere along the line I realized that the nearest thing I could get to Monopoly in the real world was business in general, and startups in particular.

On account of my childhood revelation that I wanted to work in business, I attended Babson College to study finance and entrepreneurship. In was in college that I realized the beauty of business was that good companies give people the things that they want, at a price they find reasonable enough to pay. This revelation lead me to my first entrepreneurial venture; which was fittingly a store selling something everyone wants; Ice Cream. After finishing school and selling my ice cream business, I've worked for a telecommunications company called IPC where I helped start a business division from scratch and later for a startup online advertising firm called [x+1], developing applications that helped advertisers get more value from their online advertising.

I have come to Magnify to help grow the business, and to continue to look for new and better ways that magnify can deliver value to its customers. Magnify represents what I believe is the next way of thinking about online video. I hope to be able to help you express yourself to friends and strangers with shared interests in ways you would not have previously thought possible.

Phil Ripperger, VP Sales

There are two things that I've been passionate about for most of my career: publishing and the Internet. Since my second job out of school (that's college, to be clear) running the classified advertising department for a San Francisco daily paper, I've watched my two loves engage and evolve. Frankly, the changes going on as media moves online now seem entirely predictable if you've had a foot in both worlds for a while. As a National Sales Manager at Miller-Freeman (part of United Business Media) and then as publisher of Internet World and InternetWorld.com (Penton Media), I was fortunate to be at the epicenter of the first big wave of the Internet as being core to not only media but business. Even then, I was aware that that wave would only the first, and now we find ourselves riding a much, much bigger one. Along the way I've made many friends who are now leading the transformation from print to digital, and I've helped a number of organizations do that as well. At Nielsen, then FirstLight ERA, and most recently at TechWeb (nee CMP Technology), I've prided myself in helping my clients grow their business by seeing the forest for the digital trees, and I've been proud of my ability to be near, but not too far out in front of the cutting edge.

At Magnify.net I've found a media platform that makes my friends sit up and take notice. Yes, Virginia -- there is a video Santa Claus. Until now, video was that necessary but painful product that cost to much and was not so easy to monetize. So when I show publishers and partners the power of Aggregation and Curation, and give them tangible solutions with turn-key implementation... well, lets just say I'm making new friends every day.

Pamela Yoder, Manager, Business Affairs

I've always believed that along with food and shelter, storytelling is a basic human need. Video sharing started on cave walls, we chipped stories into granite, we now capture stories -- literally by lining up little electric blips out of thin air. I believe in the essence of storytelling so much I am a card-carrying journalist. I've shot, produced & edited hundreds of long-form documentaries over the last 20 years. You've seen my work on A&E, MSNBC, National Geographic, CNN, CBS, Court TV and more. I even have awards to prove it!

So what gives with my title today? I also learned that to be a successful creative, you have to be able to run a business. Contracts shape the resources and money you will have to work on a project, the lawyers can actually sometimes pave the way to make things happen. Effective budgets and money management make the difference between profit or deficit. Plus, I like working with numbers, they tell stories in their own way.

Everything I've done leads up to this moment. Magnify.net is here to give a voice to you -- to empower you to tell your story. I couldn't be more proud. Have you shared a video today?

Kimberly Peterson, Senior Developer

When I was in high school, I was bad at math and good at language. In college I majored in English and French and never took a computer course. I think everyone was surprised when I suddenly decided to become a programmer after a brief and uninspiring career in the fashion industry. Its not as weird as you'd think.

Programming is fundamentally about language. Its the only job I can think of where what you write, the stories you conceive, structure, and edit, literally come alive as you type. Code has a tone, a grammar -- an elegant turn of phrase can collapse 30 lines of spaghetti into an efficient 4-line loop. The words I write can link total strangers from opposite corners of the globe together, not just in a database row, but, potentially, in a friendship. That's the power of words.

After years of working as consultant, mostly for companies that maintain internal applications that only they will ever see, Magnify.net gives me the opportunity to write stories that thousands of people see and interact with every day. I'm still bad at math.

Billy Linker, Community Development Manager

I have always liked documentaries. So after college (and a one year stint as a painter in the Caribbean), I went to make the movies I loved. I worked for film festivals, a film sales and financing company, and most recently, the production company, Trigger Street Independent. Time and time again, I saw great films fall by the wayside because they didn't have an "audience." Yet, I knew there was audience because my friends and I all wanted to see them. I soon discovered a space where no matter how small the audience, those movies could flourish: the Internet. I switched over to the digital space, where I now work to create and enable the distribution of content.

At Magnify.net, I'm helping people discover their voice through video. No matter who you are or where your taste lies, Magnify.net has something for you. And if you don't see it, create a channel and find your audience. We're here to help you every step of the way.

Paul White, Designer / UI Developer

When I first started designing, it was with crayons and colored pencils, back when I was 4. Then I got my first computer, and I never looked back. Now I sometimes feel like the screen and keyboard and extensions of my brain. Some of my design work is clean and simple, and some of the stuff I do is "way out there." One thing I love about Magnify.net is there is no shortage of ideas, creative stimuli, and channels being built that can use a hand with graphics, new user-interface elements, and general visual design assistance. Overall, graphics are about communicating clearly with pictures -- telling a story that connects with people.

Now that I've moved from Albuquerque to Greenpoint Brooklyn, Magnify.net is a great way for me to combine working with technology and working with people. It's fantastic to be able to be part designer, part geek, and part site developer -- and I love seeing what everyone is doing on Magnify.net.

Simon Marriott, Software Engineer

I believe that there is something incredibly special about the way in which the web allows us to share and interrelate our ways of seeing the world no matter where we are.

I cut my teeth building software to enable journalists and producers to publish to the websites of CNN and the BBC. Technologically, our work was very much based on the foundations laid by the open source movement. I looked forward to the time when those principles of openness that have so revolutionized software would extend to the media itself -- to the production and management of content. That time is now and this is why I am here at Magnify.net. Here I can help to build tools that empower us all to project, reflect and refract our views of the world around us.