About Me

I'm a technology marketing executive. That's a term that I came up with to describe my cross-functional experience of engineering, marketing, and finance.

In January 2010, Shiny Ads was officially launched. It is a self-service advertising platform that allows web publishers to take advertising orders directly on their web site from small advertisers.

Spring of 2009 and it's time for a change. Shiny Agency is the new marketing agency that I started in May 2009 to target brand marketing inside social networks and outside social network but using social graph principals. It focuses on Facebook, Facebook Connect and Twitter campaigns.

In early 2007, I co-founded a boutique marketing agency focused on social media marketing and especially Facebook. Refresh Partners worked almost exclusively on end-to-end design, development and marketing of Facebook applications/campaigns working with marketing agencies. Welcome to the next dot.com era!

At the beginning of 2007, I was (and still am) involved with the Maple Leaf Angel organization and also consulted with an ex-Certicom CEO to re-launch Bioscrypt Inc (TSX: BYT) after its acquisition of A4 Vision and its office/people restructuring.

From 2005 to the end of 2006, I was involved in a network security startup based in Markham, Ontario. Snipe Networks launched a network behaviour analysis solution that targeted security threats and network operational issues inside the corporate network (as opposed to the network edge).

For the most part of the 2005 summer, I was involved in a startup venture that was building the infrastructure for a new open-network payment system.

In early 2003, I came back to Canada from San Francisco to join Certicom Corp (TSX: CIC) as their VP of Marketing and Product Management. They mostly sell security technology (patents and SDKs). In the two years that I was there we were able to raise the stock price from $0.64 to over $6.00 (a lot of that recognition should be given to Certicom's founder Scott Vanstone and the NSA).

In the winter of 1999 I moved to the San Francisco area to get away from risk-adverse Canadian companies. I had a great six months before the dot.com crash made the entire valley very depressing. During those 4 years, I worked at Cisco Systems creating and then pushing their VPN strategy. Cisco went from nowhere to #1 in the VPN market.

In Ottawa, I was part of a startup called TimeStep Corp that was at the forefront of VPN products and technology. This is where I made my transition from engineering (Security Architect) to marketing (Dir. Product Management). While I was the security architect, I authored many IETF RFCs that defined the IPSec VPN and other Internet standards as well as authored several patents. When Newbridge Networks acquired TimeStep, it allowed me to follow my dream and move to the high-tech mecca, Silicon Valley. (Newbridge was then acquired by Alcatel).

Merlin Systems was my first startup and it lasted for 4 years. In that time span, we launched 13 products in 3 product families. This was 1992 when the Internet was just coming into the spotlight and when modem-based BBSs were hot. Our software helped BBSs harness the power of the Internet (which eventually killed off BBS technology). I learned a lot at Merlin Systems, mostly about what my current limitations were.

I grew up in Ottawa and so my first job was in the high-tech sector and the federal government. I set up the first federal government BBS in North America.

Contact Information

email: rp96@hotmail.com
twitter: roymap