Emota - About

Paul To - CEO & Founder

Paul is a seasoned entrepreneur and intrapreneur.  Prior to founding Emota, Paul founded and ran Nortel's New Business Incubation and Accelerator Program. This program produced two “Product of the Year” awards, 40+ patents, multiple successful exits and acquisitions within 18 months. Paul also founded and led strategic product initiatives such as "Phone of the Future," "Revolutionary User Experience" and "Next Generation Collaboration."  Prior to Nortel, he founded and ran a successful software company and was part of the leadership team at a 2001 IPO called Riverstone Networks.

Cyprien Noel - Context Aware Real Time Messaging Framework

Cyprien specializes in high performance real time messaging framework. His work is being utilized at NASA and stock exchanges and he is founder of ObjectFabric - a popular open source Java library for real time messaging. At Emota, he is developing a cloud based platform to handle context aware real time messaging between apps and Internet Connected Things that is highly scaleable yet lightweight.

Harlan Iverson - Principal Software Developer

Harlan founded several Open Source projects throughout his career. He is the Pragmatic Programmer incarnate. After mastering a long string of programming languages, frameworks, and tools, he has become a highly knowledgable advocate of development best practices.

Laura Kassovic - Designer of Internet Connected Things & Toys

We snatched Laura from Intel where she worked as a Hardware Component Designer. She is an amazing hardware designer and has the rare combination of hardware, electronics, embedded programing, AND toy design, sewing skills.

Charissa Klassen - Artist and UI Designer

Charissa is an award winning artist and UI designer. She has produced art for several popular iPhone apps before joining Emota. In 2011 alone, she has received 1 Best-of-Show, 2 Gold Medals and ADDY's Awards from the American Advertising Association.

Sunil Masand - Consultant

Sunil is a versatile technical leader with close to 20 years of IT experience. He has worked in leadership and management roles across Product Management, Services, and Engineering at Model N, the leader in the Revenue Management space, where he led product implementations, and built and managed technical practices and offshore operations. Sunil is customer focused, enjoys solution design and development, and has provided technical consulting services at various levels to a number of companies like Triton Containers, JP Morgan and Philip Morris International.

Our Advisory Team

Dr. Michael Carter - Ethnography & User Centered Design

Dr. Carter is an experienced software technologist and a social anthropologist.  He was a Principal Investigator of the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Youth Project, which interviewed 800+ young people and spent over 5000 hours observing what they do online. He also directed technology research at Apple, and served as Chief Playwright at Zookazoo.com.

Wayne Pan, MD, PhD, MBA

Wayne brings more than 20 years of healthcare industry experience, from clinical medicine—as an orthopedic hand surgeon to molecular biology research, to managed care and health IT. He received his Bachelor’s Degree in biology from Johns Hopkins University, and completed his MD and PhD at Mount Sinai School of Medicine. After five years of clinical practice, Wayne transitioned into administrative medicine, holding positions as Medical Director and CMO at Medicaid-managed care plans and an IPA, and is currently the Chief Medical Officer at the Individual Practice Association Medical Group of Santa Clara County (SCCIPA). In 2007, Wayne graduated with an MBA from the Wharton School and serves there now as an Adjunct Assistant Professor, Marketing.

Sylvestre G. Quevedo, MD - Medical Advisor

Dr. Quevedo is currently serving as Medical Director of Duke Integrative Medicine.  He previously served as the Director of Clinical Programs at the Osher Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), where he also held the Osher Foundation Chair in Integrative Medicine. Dr. Quevedo earned his medical degree at Harvard Medical School and a Master of Public Health degree at Harvard's School of Public Health. He also was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar at Stanford University.