pingVision, LLC

pingVision, LLC is an interactive media design and development company based in Boulder, Colorado. Since its transition from an informal partnership headed by founders Laura Scott and Kate Lawrence into a limited liability company in January 2006 as pingVision, LLC, pingVision has designed and developed websites for corporations, non-profit organizations, educational institutions, online media ventures and virtual communities.

With strength in design and coding, and expertise in scalability and performance for enterprise-level deployments, we bring to every job professional experience in Drupal-based web development and deployment, information architecture and interactive design, as well as PHP, MySQL, Flash, video production, post-production and encoding, and DVD authoring.

Recent sites developed include Popular Science (PopSci.com), the development and case study of which won the grand prize at DrupalCon Boston 2008. (A case study of the Popular Science development is posted at http://drupal.org/node/233090 .) Other clients include E. W. Scripps, Stanford University, BMW, AG and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

pingVision regularly hosts the Denver/Boulder Drupal User Group Meet-Ups. All are welcome!

People

• Laura Scott (laura s), President, has been designing and deploying websites for individuals and businesses since 1994. She has over a dozen years’ experience in television and video as an editor, motion-graphics artist and compositor and producer for HBO pictures, various indie film companies and a number of Fortune500 corporations. Laura has been involved with Drupal since 2004. Laura is a Drupal.org Site Maintainer, Drupal documentation contributor, manager of the Community group on Groups.Drupal, presenter at the 2007 OSCMS and DrupalCon Boston 2008, and an active participant in the Drupal support chatrooms, discussion forums and email lists. In January 2008, Laura was elected as Permanent Member of the General Assembly of the Drupal Association.
• Kate Lawrence (klawrence), Chief Operations Officer, has held management positions at Hewlett-Packard, DuPont and a number of venture capital-backed start-ups. Kate holds a double-major undergraduate degree in Chemistry and History from the University of Washington, where she also did Masters Degree work in the History Department and the Far Eastern and Slavic Institute. Her post-baccalaureate academic studies have been in applied mathematics and life sciences. She holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, specializing in Technology Management and New Ventures.
• Andy Kirkham (AjK), Software Engineer and Lead Developer, is currently a Drupal.org CVS administrator, site document maintainer, and Drupal security team member. Andy maintains or co-maintains quite a few modules, including Scheduler, Janode, Authorship and Automated Logout, as well as a number of other custom modules soon to be contributed to the Drupal community. Originally trained as an electrical engineer, Andy specialized in power generation, transmission, automation, imaging and the black arts of analogue design. During the fifteen years he spent as a Hardware/Software Enginner designing high speed machine vision systems and process control equipment, he developed skills in C, assembler, VHDL and CISC/RISC technologies and many other hardware related techniques. Andy received his ONC and HNC in Electrical Engineering from North Trafford College in Manchester.
• Kevin Bridges (cyberswat), Lead Developer, is a 12+ year veteran of internet technology. His specialties include Linux/Apache Administration, PHP Development, Ajax/Javascript and SQL databases. He is an expert working with object oriented programming, GUI's and end user behavior patterns. Kevin has been working with Drupal for several years, maintains the Picasa and Auto Assign Role modules and is part of the unit-testing work group for Drupal 7 development. Kevin began his career in the Defense Industry as a graphic designer for Enzian Technology and evolved into an applications developer that has worked providing services for companies including Charles Schwab, Collect America and Parts.com.
• Al Steffen (Zarabadoo), Lead Themer, combines expertise in XHTML and CSS with design to maximize web functionality. One of his projects is development and maintenance of the Hunchbaque theme. Other work includes 3D modeling and animation. Before joining pingVision, he worked in content management systems for Endoze, LLC. An aficionado of all forms of animation, Al continues as webmaster of Denver’s annual Nan Desu Kan anime convention. Al holds an Associate Degree in Computer Animation from the Art Institute of Colorado.
• Matthew Saunders (MatthewS), Operations Manager, has been working and studying Technology for over 12 years. In other areas, Matthew acts as a moderator in the TechSoup Emerging Technologies Forum where nonprofits from around the world gather. He is on the management team for NonProfits in SecondLife, an international community of nonprofit organizations. Matthew holds a Studio Arts B.A. from Bishop's University, a Certificate of Arts Administration from the University of Ottawa and a Master of Fine Arts from Virginia Tech focusing on Internet technologies.
• Andy Lasda (alasda), Project Manager, Developer and Systems Administrator, has been professionally involved in technology for over 12 years as System Administrator, Web Developer, Application developer in PHP and Perl, and carries significant experience with Business Analysis, Project Management and development of web-based e-commerce and infrastructure applications.
• John Fiala (jcfiala), Developer and Software Engineer, developed the Drupal Markup Engine and co-developed (with Greg Hines) Node Carousel, both of which figured prominently in the PopSci development. (See case study linked above.) Before joining pingVision he's worked on software for the securities industry, software for managing housecleaning companies, an online store, plenty of intranet sites to manage products, and a system for securely delivering documents over the web. John spends some of his spare time learning more about web programming, and some of it playing World of Warcraft. John earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University
• Ezra Barnett Gildesgame (ezra-g), Developer, is a self-taught computer user who has honed his technical skills since 1999. He has worked in a technical capacity for Amusement Consultants, the New Roc Funhouse megaplex entertainment center and the Knitting Factory music venue in New York City as a computer consultant (intern), website maintainer and music reviewer. His high school independent project was a collaboration with History professors to create an easy-to-use archival system for scanned images from a diverse library of print media using a web-server. He brings with him practical skills in Drupal, video, PHP, MySQL, Javascript, HTML and RSS.
• Greg Hines (Greg Hines), Themer and Developer, is co-developer and co-maintainer of Node Carousel. Greg has been designing and developing web sites for eight years and he's been active in the Web Standards community since before it was fashionable. He excels at standards-compatible design, cross-browser compatibility, and semantic markup, working in PHP and ASP.NET. He also does a fair bit of JavaScript and occasional systems administration. Before joining pingVision, Greg worked on web sites such as Ars Technica and FilmWad.
• Ben Jeavons (Coltrane), Developer, is developer and maintainer of the Jott and AWeber Integration modules. He joined pingVision after building grassroots-media, online communities for the Enthusiast Group in Boulder, Colorado. He has been working on websites since high-school, beginning with HTML and CSS he now relishes working with PHP building fun and challenging systems. A Colorado native, Ben is a graduate from the University of Colorado at Boulder with a degree in Computer Science.
• Donald Hajicek (theoria), Graphic Designer, has worked as an illustrator, copywriter, creative director and art director. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, Bostonia, and other leading publications. Leo Burnett, Inc., Ogilvy and Mather, Foote, Cone and Blending, and J. Walter Thompson are also among his past clients. Don studied at the School at the Art Institute of Chicago and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth.
• Kevin LaPalme (kjl), Developer, is a Drupal veteran with ten years' professional web experience – 4 of them in Drupal development – joining pingVision after working for Trellon. Previously he was a owner/employee of a web collective that built Drupal web sites for labor unions, and before that worked in the web department of a television production company owned by Lorne Michaels. He's been building sites professionally since 1998.
• Amy Tremper (amytremper), Graphic Designer, has has been a freelance graphic artist for marketing consultants, photographers, non-profits and small businesses. Her focus in design has been brand identity and marketing material for both commercial and fine art photographers. She has a B.A. in Fine Art from the College of Santa Fe.
• Laurie Olson (Lauko) has worked for more than 25 years in the areas of administration, data management and writing. Her interest in computers started to take a serious turn when, while on temporary assignment at IBM, she wrote the users’ manual for an in-house data-tracking software and learned to program in Turbo Pascal. From there she went on to work with data management and analysis in the area of cross-cultural adaptation, primarily with a psychometric behavioral assessment tool and ongoing follow-up data.

Emeritus Developers and Designers

• Greg Knaddison (greggles) has been contributing to Open Source projects since 1999. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School with a degree in Information Systems, Greg’s technology experience spans the gamut from profitability models built with Excel macros to web-based decision engines built on top of Oracle. He has worked for large firms, including Arthur Andersen and Price Waterhouse Coopers, as well as for Azure Solutions and Charter Communications. Greg is an expert in Drupal, Linux, PHP, Python/Jython and MySQL. Greg is "disorganizer" of the Denver Drupal User's Group, is a Drupal.org site maintainer, and has been an active patcher in the Drupal community.
• Rich Orris (rorris) has been involved with Open Source software since 1999, working as lead developer for CivicActions, LLC, web developer, graphic designer and house manager for Empire State Plaza Performing Arts Center (The Egg), and technology and information specialist for the Home Care Association of New York State. A graduate of Wesleyan University with a BA in Computer Science, Rich is an expert in web standards, PHP, MySQL, Linux, Apache, JavaScript, Shell scripting, AJAX, Ruby on Rails, XHTML, XML, CSS, Drupal, CivicSpace, CiviCRM.
• Valerie Gerry worked in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience, doing computer programming and database management as part of her duties as Lab Manager at Dartmouth Center for Cognitive Neuroscience and research assistant at Yale University. She has co-authored scientific research in the field, based on data she helped capture and analyze. Before joining pingVision, Valerie worked at the University of Colorado at Boulder as a Graphic Designer. Valerie earned her BA, Cum Laude, in Psychological and Brain Sciences from Dartmouth College and is currently working toward her MFA at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

For more info, please visit the pingVision website: http://pingv.com