This seasoned team of contemporary professionals is poised to capitalize on this timely culled gem of marketing potential.
Jeffery K Wood | Founder/CEO
Mr. Wood graduated from U.C. Davis with a B.S. in Economics & Business Management. For over twenty years he was a financial consultant to Silicon Valley’s best and brightest including the founders of Novell, Moto-X Fox, Informix, EG&G Reticon and many others. He composed, produced, arranged and played keyboards on his Mesa/Atlantic Records jazz release “Woodworks One”. He co-founded Audiohighway.com and took it public in 1998; inventors and original patent holders of the first portable Internet audio player (MP3) the “Listen-Up”. He created Internet firsts with The Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Jazziz, comedy, music, thousands of audio books and more. He is also a real estate broker and owns his own brokerage, Woodworks Properties. He is skilled in leadership, management, organization, creativity and ethics.
Roger Nelson | CTO
Roger Nelson has just played an instrumental role in completing the successful spin-off of Kerner Optical from Industrial, Light and Magic. He is now immersed in the development of independent film production units located on the famous Kerner Optical campus in San Rafael. Many films were produced there including Pirates of the Caribbean 3 and Noah. Roger was the Chief Technical Officer of Q-Zar Laser Tag and CTO of Virtual World, launching the first Jordan Weisman’s and Tim Disney virtual reality sites. He is responisble for playing a major role in bringing the concept of site location based virtual reality to American and helped launch the industry. In 2000 he co-founded Vuppet an electronics company that creates aesthetically advanced , evolutionary human input devices focusing on the expanding video game industry. He will be a tremendous asset for the virtual creation of the entire Zipton universe.
Frank Hill | Creative Director
Frank Hill is a reknown cartoonist, illustrator and designer. His work has appeared in newspapers, books, comics and a host of other media. He worked for many years at Warner Brothers drawing Bugs Bunny for the newspaper comic strip from 1984 to 1986. He also worked on Tom & Jerry, the Flintstones, Casper the Ghost, Felix the Cat and the Jetsons. He helped draw the Peanuts syndicted comic strip for over two years working for Charles Schultz and was involved with the entire Peanuts Gang. He has been an Art Director and Editor with a staff of over 30 people and has designed characters and marketing products for over 40 years. He was Frank O’Neal’s assistance on the newspaper strip “Short Ribs” for many years and took it over completely after O’Neals retirement in 1973 until 1982. Frank brings the experience and management skills of a true veteran of the art industry and will help define the look and feel of the Zipton revolution.
Fred Borcherdt | VP Product Developement
Fred Borcherdt has pioneered the industry as an early adopter of
Autodesk’s evolutionary 3D Studio Max. ( www.autodesk.com/3dsmax )
He then continued onto SEGA ( www.sega.com ), leading the Dreamcast
design team for the release of the first online console network to
over 10 M consumers. Mr. Borcherdt went on to be part of the development
team for the Emmy Award winning MobiTV. www.mobitv.com
Kurtis Hough | Art Director
Artist and 3D animator Kurtis Hough, whose award-winning work has been featured on national television, numerous international film festivals, art galleries, corporate commercials, video games, and music videos.
Arthur Koch | Artist
Arthur Koch commands a wide array of talents that are tailor-made for the Zipton project. He brings over 20 years of 2D/3D digital artist animation experience, including 11 years at Electronic Arts. While at EA he worked in all aspects of computer graphics for video games. He has worked on over 30 video games and understands the Zipton market. Mr. Koch excelled as Art Director for EA*Kids and was on the ground floor of the educational product line that was purchased by the Learning Company. He spent 5 years as an illustrator and graphic artist for print and a year at the Art Institute of California teaching Organic and Hard Surface Modeling in Maya. He has been a course Director at Expressions College for Digital Arts, contracting for Red Hill Studios and freelances as a photography. Mr Koch will aid in the transformation of creative energy and concept to visual renderings of implied images.
Dr. Mary Riordan-Karlsson | Educational Advisor
Dr. Mary Riordan-Karlsson is a world class educational tour-de-force. She has written 7 books on education, earned a Doctor of Education and Masters in Language and Literacy from U.C. Berkeley, a Bachelor of Arts in Elementary Education and minor in English and History from Boston College and has California, New York and Massachuetts teaching credentials. She has been the lead writer for the State of California’s Education and the Environment Initiative Model Curriculum Planning Committee mandated by Assembly Bill 1548. As Digital Media Director for the College Board she designed and supervised the online Community College Success Initiative Springboard-(TM) Program. As Director of Education for Pearson Broadband Schools Group, now Pearson Digital Learning, she developed the Knowledgebox-(TM) K-6 digital learning system and helped align all content to fifty states for National Standards achieving over 2.1 correlations. She has won numerous awards, has consulted on over 30 major educational projects, is a popular lecturer and brings a comprehensive educational strategy to Zipton Inc.
George C Coakley | VP of Marketing
George C. Coakley is well known for his advertising genius and he co-founded Coakley-Heagerty, a marketing agency, over 45 years ago. He is currently a teacher and lecturer at San Jose State instructing students on advertising campaigns, copy writting, ethics and evaluation of advertising and copy testing methods. Mr. Coakley has a degree in Advertising from San Jose State also. Best known for masterminding the marketing campaign for the “Pet Rock” which sold nearly 2 million units, he was instrumental in the design and implementation of other well know ad campaigns including Plantronics, Pong, Marie Calanders, Oral B and Bank of the West, to name just a few. He was honored as the outstanding JMC Advertising graduate in 1988 and was a former military newspaper editor and freelance sportswriter for the Oakland Tribune. He is a special advisor to the United States’ Global Housing fund, flies his own plane and plays tennis when time permits. He will be leading the marketing efforts of Zipton Inc.
Brian Sussman | Media Consultant
Brian Sussman is best known as the past main TV weather man for the SF Bay Area’s CBS station, KPIX Channel 5. He was the nation’s youngest television News Director at KMIZ-TV in Columbia, Missouri before moving from behind the camera to in front of it. His post-graduate studies were in meterorogy and his television weatherman career took him from San Jose CA. at KNTV, to Reno, then Pittsburgh and final back to his home state of California at KPIX. He has won numerous Emmy, Associated Press and Radio and News Director awards. The National Education Associates bestowed its Distinguished Service Honor for elementary education to him and in 1990 he was the “fill-in” weatherman on the nationally broadcasted CBS Morning Show. He is rightfully proud of creating “Brian’s Kids” which utilized the power of his KPIX broadcasts to find homes for over 400 foster children, adopting 3 children himself. He is currently a talk show host at KSFO in the Bay Area. His media and educational savvy will be a formidable asset durning production.
Jamie Bridges | Director of Audio Engineering
Jamie Bridges is a audio recording master engineer and producer with over 25 years of experience capturing some of the most memorable moments in recent music history. He has worked with hundreds of artists including James Brown, Jerry Garcia, David Crosby, Jesse Colin Young, Mickey Hart and Al Stewart. He spent years working at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch and contributed his audio engineering skills to many films including Mrs. Doubtfire, A River Runs Through It, Single White Female, Jurassic Park and Toys. He recorded Tramaine Hawkins Grammy winning live CD and was the lead sound engineer on Jeffrey K. Wood’s “Woodworks One”. Mr. Bridges brings the audio firepower that is needed to assure the finest sound reproduction for the Zipton enterprise.
David Politis | Public Relations
David Politis is an award-winning strategic communications, public relations, investor relations and marketing communications professional with more than 50 industry honors that span his 20-plus years as a communications consultant. David formed Politis Communications, a high-tech and life science public relations firm in 1990 and the agency was selected in 1999 as one of the fastest growing firms in Utah as a member of the Utah100 Mountain West Capital network. David has served on the board of directors of the Utah Valley Entrepreneurial Forum and wrote the “Utah Tech Watch”, a syndicated weekly column for over 10 years. He has also written about technology for the Desert Morning News, The Daily Hearld and The Enterprise; all Utah based newspapers. He had great success as the publicist for Audiohighway.com and many other high tech firms. He earned a B.S. degree in Mass Communications from BYU and is an adjunct professor there while lecturing on public relations at Utah universities and business conferences.
John Joss | Voice of Winston
John Joss is best known as the voice of Jeeves for “Ask Jeeves”. He has a commanding English flair in his tone and he will be the voice of “Winston” for our production. John’s talents transcend just a gifted voice-over professional and his SF Bay Area persona was never more evident than when he wrote, produced and spoke on over 500 “Technology Updates” on KCBS radio. He has over 40 years of experience in acting, broadcasting and writing in Europe and the U.S. He worked on London’s West End stage as the English colonel in Peter Ustinov’s “The Love of Four Colonels” , at the Fortune Theater and preformed in Moliere revivals there. He has worked on network radio and televison including PBS, CBS and a variety of regional stations. He has written over 20 books and has written and directed several short films. Besides the endearing voice of “Winston”, John brings a valuable creative prospective that will be utilized by the production process.
Art Twain | Jingle/Hook composer
Art Twain is a living legend. His jingles have touched us all from “Fall into the Gap” and “C&H Pure Cane Sugar” to “Corbett Canyon (with the famous echo…echo…echo…)” A Communications major graduate of U.C. Berkeley, he got his first job as a copywriter at the Campbell Ewald Advertising agency in San Francisco. Working through three national agencies he ended up as the head writer on the Levi Strauss account at Honig, Cooper and Harrington, now known as Foote, Cone & Belding. He created “The Gap” persona and went on to win 13 national awards producing, writing and arranging his own commericals for clients. He has won Cleo’s, an Emmy, International Broadcast Awards and wrote and produced the 3rd highest rated financial commercial to date for Visa. He has scored films and written and produced over 3,000 radio and TV commercials. He is a creative tour-de-force and a powerful ally of Zipton Inc.
