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Futuristic Design, Inc. |
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Mike Pell has a rare combination of talents -- maverick designer, business-savvy technologist, charismatic leader and empathetic customer advocate. Widely regarded as a visionary interface designer, Pell has founded his own companies, worked for both Silicon Valley startups as well as large industry-leading corporations, and done independent consulting. Over his 25 years in the software industry, Pell has worked in a myriad of roles, from executive management positions of design and technology, to individual contributor positions for software engineering, program management, business development, UI design, marketing and sales.
Notable Industry Experience Mike Pell is currently driving the design of next generation user experiences for the Server and Cloud. His previous design work can be seen in Internet Explorer 9, Windows 7, Outlook, Search and Mobile. Prior to joining Microsoft, Pell was recruited by CEO, Alex St. John, to found and run the Enterprise Group within WildTangent, Inc. in Redmond, WA. Pell delivered over a dozen innovative examples of solving real business problems through interactive 3D graphics embedded within web pages for major companies. Also tapped by St. John to lead the successful execution and deployment of the WildTangent Game Channel, a major shift in corporate strategy to sell online web games direct to consumers. While in Silicon Valley during the 1990's, Pell spent six years at Adobe Systems as an engineering manager and computer scientist, where he was a key developer and user interface designer on the Adobe Acrobat 1.0 team. In fact, he was the first engineer assigned to the project once it was green lighted by John Warnock. During that development cycle, he pioneered the use of Multiple Master font substitution technology in Acrobat and devised a dynamic multi-lingual installer for use with seven language versions of Acrobat. Also during that time in the early 1990's, Pell became actively involved with Pixar to help vet their RenderMan technology for producing photorealistic 3D graphics on desktop computers. He developed a "PostScript Tyep 1 font to 3D text" tool prototype that served as the inspiration for Pixar's Typestry product.
Entrepreneurial and Startup Experience The entrepreneurial bug took hold of Mike Pell very early. Right out of college in 1985, he co-founded Beyond, Inc. , one of the earliest Macintosh utility software companies. Pell did the early programming, but transitioned into managing the daily operations, sales, customer support, marketing, advertising and final production. The company was sold five years later. Pell then moved to Silicon Valley to join Emerald City Software as a software engineer. He was a member of the small team that developed the awarding winning TypeAlign type-manipulation software in three months, start to finish. That company was later acquired by Adobe in 1989. After his stint at Adobe Systems working on the beginnings of Acrobat, he left to join a recently-funded startup with his ex-Adobe colleagues as Program Manager and Interface Architect for Newfire, Inc. It's there he designed award-winning 3D online game technologies and managed the engineering teams. Also while at Newfire, Pell published the paper "Overlaying Motion, Time and Distance in 3-Space", and presented at the CHI '97 user interface conference in Atlanta. After Newfire ran out of funding, he joined Promptu Systems as Director of Operations for this VC-backed Internet startup. As a member of the senior management team, Pell managed the engineering, quality assurance, professional services and support groups. He was also responsible for overseeing all active projects and deploying new web-based eBusiness systems for customers such as Shell, Apple, 3Com, Logitech and Specialized. Pell left Promptu to become (acting) Chief Technical Officer for Fuel RTM, Inc., a marketing communications company in Santa Clara, CA that developed enterprise-wide marketing systems. While at Fuel, he worked on various web-based and traditional marketing projects for NVIDIA, WebTV, Inventa and Nortel, among others. Pell founded Futuristic
Design, Inc. in March 2000 to bring a new breed of web-based
business communications tools to market. His experience
with Internet startups, web-based applications, enterprise solutions, and desktop software companies
gave him a very broad perspective on finding appropriate customer solutions
in that space, and continues to help clients find the right approach
for their products and services. Awards and Patents Pell has also won several awards for product excellence in the software industry over the years. These include: 3D Design Magazine Editor's Choice, Software Publisher's Association Codie, Byte Magazine's Award of Excellence and MacUser Magazine's Eddy Award. Pell has been awarded several software patents while at Microsoft Corporation in the areas of search user interface and mobile information systems.
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About the