Livefyre Expands Leadership Team with Key Executive Hires
San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) October 28, 2013 -- Livefyre, provider of the leading real-time conversation and social curation platform, today announced the appointment of two prominent industry executives. Ramana Rao has joined Livefyre as its new Chief Technology Officer and Pierre Wolff has been named as the company’s Vice President of Corporate and Business Development.
Rao is a high profile entrepreneur and digital thought leader in the Bay Area. Previously, he served as VP of Product for The Washington Post Company after it acquired iCurrent, a personal news aggregator that he founded. Rao previously spun Inxight Software, Inc. out from the legendary Xerox PARC. As Inxight’s Chief Technology Officer, he was responsible for the strategic vision and architecture of the company's products and technologies. Rao’s pioneering work in information visualization and text analytics includes 25 patents and patent applications and many highly-cited research papers. He has also spoken at many influential conferences including TED, Next 20 Years, DEMO, and the International Design Conference in Aspen.
In his role as CTO of Livefyre, Rao will oversee product development and the infrastructure that powers social experiences for more than 550 enterprise customers, delivering over 1 billion page views each month. As Livefyre rapidly expands, Rao will be charged with ensuring the Livefyre network, currently the 4th largest on the web, can continue to deliver a superior experience for Livefyre customers and their users.
“Livefyre is in an incredible market position,” Rao stated. “Very few companies have the rare combination of strong demand, exceptional talent and product offerings that truly make a difference for their customers. I look forward to helping Livefyre scale the products, platform and organization.”
Livefyre also announced the appointment of Pierre Wolff as VP of Corporate and Business Development, who will lead M&A and strategic partnerships for the company. Wolff has deep experience with early and mid-stage startups, most recently serving as Managing Director to a corporate development advisory, E-coSearch Inc., working with startups on M&A and business development transactions. Prior to that he was VP, Business Development at Imperium, an online security company and served as Co-Founder and CEO of the video classification services company AdPassage. An internet pioneer, Wolff has served as VP, Business Development for early social network, Tribe.net; financial information service, Revere Data; first “pay per action” ad network, Impulse! Buy Network (acquired by Inktomi) and first online payment system, First Virtual Holdings. Wolff started his career at Reuters in 1994, where he helped them evaluate business opportunities on the then nascent Internet. Wolff also holds advisory board seats for a number of tech companies including ReplyBuy, Fanplayr Inc., Tout and WebServius.
Livefyre founder and CEO Jordan Kretchmer commented, “Livefyre is excited to welcome these well known executives who will take us to the next level as a leading enterprise technology company. Rao is a highly regarded pioneer within the tech community and his contribution will be instrumental in helping us grow our best-in-class engineering team. Wolff’s experience providing strategy in pricing, go-to-market strategies and M&A will be invaluable as we enter our next stage of aggressive growth.”
Both Rao and Wolff will be based in the company's San Francisco headquarters.
About Livefyre
Livefyre helps companies engage consumers through a combination of real-time conversation, social curation and social advertising. With Livefyre's social CMS, brands can integrate real-time social content into their websites, mobile apps, advertisements and television broadcasts to increase viewer engagement, boost website traffic and drive revenue. As the fourth largest network online, Livefyre is powering real-time social experiences for over 550 leading brands including American Idol, AOL, Bravo, CBS, Conde Nast, Cox Media Group, Dow Jones/WSJ, FOX Sports, Mashable, NASCAR, Showtime, Sony Playstation, Sports Illustrated, The New York Times and Universal Music Group. Livefyre also acquired social storytelling platform Storify in September 2013.
Founded in 2009 with offices in San Francisco, New York and London, Livefyre was named one of the best places to work in the Bay Area by the San Francisco Business Times. For more information, visit http://www.livefyre.com or follow us Twitter and Instagram at @livefyre or @storify.
Colleen McMillen, Livefyre, http://www.livefyre.com, +1 (917) 344-9360, [email protected]
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