Leadership

Derek Ball

Derek has been a distinguished leader in the emerging technology industry for more than 15 years. Before Tynt, Derek served as CEO at Sonic Mobility Inc, a mobile software company that was acquired by Avocent Corp (NASDAQ: AVCT) in 2004. In between Sonic Mobility and Tynt, Derek coached dozens of early stage tech ventures as an Entrepreneur In Residence for Calgary Technologies Inc. He has been responsible for raising millions of dollars in capital for his own start-ups and working with strategic partners including: Microsoft, RIM, HP, Lockheed Martin and the US military. Derek has published over a dozen books in emerging technology and has been a noted speaker worldwide for many years.

Jim Hirshfield

Jim has more than 20 years of high-tech sales and marketing experience in emerging technology and media companies.
Before Tynt, Jim served as the VP of Business Development at Zemanta, a Slovenian start-up backed by Union Square Ventures in the online content creation space. Additionally, Jim was the VP of Business Development at 10gen, (makers of MongoDB) an open source database launched by the team behind DoubleClick. Earlier, Jim headed up sales at Gradience, a software company in the XML Web Services space catering to financial institutions. He founded PledgeBay.com after serving as the Head of Business Development at Wired, WhoWhere.com, and closing high profile alliances on behalf of Lycos. During an 8-year tenure with Reuters, Jim sold multi-million dollar software systems. He received a degree in Engineering from Columbia University.