Board & Advisors

Adriana Neagu

Adriana Neagu, co-founder of Formotus, currently serves as its CEO and President of Engineering. Adriana is the creator of the Formotus platform, a technology combining the convenience of cloud services and the power of mobile computing. She is a recognized expert with several patents in data applications and XML technologies.

Adriana was tapped by the White House in 2011 to participate in a panel discussion about entrepreneurship and startups broadcast as part of President Obama’s town hall meeting event at Facebook headquarters. In 2007 her work creating the Formotus platform won her the national Technology Innovator of the Year title from the Stevie Award for Women in Business..

Previously Adriana worked at Microsoft, where she was co-inventor of Microsoft Office InfoPath. Before joining Microsoft, Adriana worked in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency on a joint Soviet/American project. She graduated with high honors from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest with a degree in Computer Science, and pursued doctoral studies at the University Vienna.

Joe Verschueren

Joe Verschueren, co-founder and former CEO, is now dedicated fully to business development at Formotus including sales, marketing, and carrier relations. Joe is a serial entrepreneur, twice recognized by Ernst & Young as an Entrepreneur of the Year Finalist. He co-founded ImageX in 1995 with an initial venture capital investment of $3.5M, and during his time there the company raised more than $160M and completed its IPO in 1999. Joe has more than 20 years of experience in the wireless industry, which he helped pioneer as one of the original members of Seattle’s first cellular company—US WEST NewVector Group (now part of Verizon Wireless).

Roger Bamford

Roger Bamford is the Principal Architect for the Oracle database, a position he has held since 1989. Prior to joining Oracle, he worked at IBM Research and then co-founded Esvel Inc., a RDBMS start-up that was ultimately sold to HP. At Esvel and Oracle, Mr. Bamford was responsible for many software innovations relating to the architecture and performance of relational database management systems and is the holder of dozens of patents relating to database and clustering technology. He currently runs a small research group incubating Xquery-based application development and deployment technology. Mr. Bamford has been an angel investor many times, including in Siebel Systems, which was acquired by Oracle for $5.85 billion, and Truveo, which sold to AOL for $50 million. He is on the advisory board of Fabric7 Systems and on the MIT EECS Visiting Committee. He also manages Bracket Media Group LLC, a private angel fund. Mr. Bamford holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from MIT and a master’s in electrical engineering from Stanford University.

Elwood Howse, Jr.

Mr. Howse  served in the U.S. Navy submarine force and returned to Stanford University Graduate School of Business to earn his Masters degree in Business Administration.  In 1977, Mr. Howse and Thomas Cable formed Cable & Howse Ventures, an early stage venture capital firm focused on technology. This Company managed five venture capital partnerships with an aggregate capitalization of $160 million and invested in 103 companies.  In 1982, Mr. Howse also participated in the founding of Cable, Howse and Ragen, investment banking and stock brokerage firm, today owned by Wells Fargo and known as Ragen, MacKenzie.  Mr. Howse has served as a corporate director and advisor to various public, private and non-profit enterprises.  He served on the board of the National Venture Capital Association and is past President of the Stanford Business School Alumni Association.  He currently serves on the boards of directors of BSQUARE Corporation (BSQR), Formotus, Inc., MicroPlanet Ltd. (TSXV – MP), Orthologic Corp. (OLGC), Perlego Corporation, PowerTech Group, Inc., and not-for-profits, Junior Achievement Worldwide and Junior Achievement of Washington.

Gordon Bell

Gordon Bell is a senior researcher in Microsoft’s Media Presence Research Group—a part of the Bay Area Research Center (BARC).   Gordon spent 23 years at Digital Equipment Corporation as Vice President of Research and Development, where he was responsible for Digital’s products. He was the architect of various mini- and time-sharing computers and led the development of DEC’s VAX and the VAX Computing Environment. He has been involved in, or responsible for, the design of many products at Digital, Encore, Ardent, and a score of other companies. He has been involved in the design of about 30 multiprocessors. He was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of New South Wales, and Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Carnegie-Mellon University.   He was the first Assistant Director of the National Science Foundation’s Computing Directorate, and led the National Research and Education Network (NREN) panel that became the NII/GII.

John Traynor

John Traynor is vice president, products at BSQUARE Corporation, where he oversees product planning, management, and development functions for mobile and embedded products. Prior to joining BSQUARE, John was vice-president, business products at Palm. He was responsible for product management and marketing of Palm’s business and enterprise offerings, including the Treo brand of Windows Mobile devices and Palm webOS. Prior to Palm, John spent 16 years at Microsoft. He most recently led product management in the Mobile Communications Group with responsibility for enterprise environments, including System Center Mobile Device Manager. John is a founding member of the advisory board of The Enterprise Mobility Foundation, the community for enterprise professionals deploying and managing mobility solutions worldwide.

Dana Florescu

Dana Florescu is the president of FLWOR, a non-profit foundation building XML-related open source software. Dana was founder and CTO of XQRL, Inc. which was acquired by BEA.  Her company XQRL implemented the XQuery processor that is the foundation of BEA’s AquaLogic. She was formerly a database researcher in INRIA (National Research Center for  Computer Science) France and at the ATT Research Center in New Jersey. Dana was a visiting scientist at the IBM Research Center in Almaden and later a senior researcher and professor at University of Paris. Dana was one of the authors of Quilt, the origin of XQuery, and she is now an editor of the XQuery specification and is a member of the W3C XML Query standardization working group, an author of XQuery and the editor of several XQuery related documents, including the query language itself. Ms. Florescu received her PhD in Computer Science, Databases and Query Processing at the University of Paris.