Kyte Management

Daniel Graf - Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder

Daniel is an internationally recognized technology pioneer with a rich background in home entertainment, consumer electronics and Internet services.

Prior to Kyte, founded in 2006, Daniel worked in the world of converging media consumer products. In 1999 and 2000 he was instrumental in the build-up of ReQuest Multimedia, an award-winning Consumer Electronics Startup Company, based in New York. There he created the world’s first MP3 Hard Disk Jukebox, the predecessor to Apple’s “iPod”. It took the team 11 months from product idea to market. ReQuest Multimedia is running a successful business up to this day.

In 2001, Daniel joined Philips Consumer Electronics where he developed several world premieres in the field of consumer electronics converging with Internet services, such as the world’s first Internet Audio stereo system and the first wireless Home Entertainment System with Internet video services. In addition to creating these awards winning new media products and bringing them to market, Daniel, together with his team, explored new businesses in the Connected Planet domain which included the development of new value propositions for TV. These propositions included domains such as IPTV, peer to peer community TV, Internet content service overlays (e.g. RSS and weather information “on top” of a TV signal), mobile TV and others.

Before ReQuest Multimedia, Daniel worked at several other companies in the field of software and electronics. Daniel has earned several awards, including the “Top 100 Swiss People of the Year 2000” award, a list of Switzerland’s most outstanding achievers, awarded by Sonntagszeitung. He earned a BS in Electrical Engineering from Interstate College of Engineering (NTB), Switzerland, and an MS in Computer and Systems Engineering from RPI, Troy NY.

Erik Abair - SVP Engineering & Co-Founder

Erik is in charge of the top level software architecture and leads the Kyte engineering team. He has spent more than a decade in the field of software development and has been managing engineering teams (both in-house and distributed) for over six years.

Prior to co-founding Kyte, Erik served as Software Architect and engineering team lead for several Royal Philips Electronics projects from 2001 to 2005.

In addition to his professional work at Philips, Erik founded and managed a distributed team of designers and engineers as part of the open source MAMEoX project.

Erik began his professional career as a software developer for ReQuest Multimedia in 1999 where he met Kyte co-founder Daniel Graf.

Joe Elliott, Chief Technology Officer

An experienced technologist with rich experience in the wireless and Internet application markets. Prior to joining Kyte, Joe was the co-founder and software architect for ThumbJive, Inc., a leading San Francisco-based company that managed and initiated projects for clients including: Amp’d Mobile, Digital Chocolate, Airplay, Hands-On Mobile, In-Fusio, Moderati and FunMail.

Joe led the technology team that created: a mobile platform for advertisement content management, user management, high score tracking, viral distribution, and media, together with the client layer for advertisement delivery and response capture; a cross platform for live photo sharing (J2ME, WAP, Web); a social network WAP service and content distribution; a general purpose platform supporting viral distribution through SMS invites, friends lists, messaging, polls, news, trivia quizzes, photo sharing and WAP games; a real-time multi-player poker puzzle challenge; and a tool for creating mock wireless applications.

Gannon Hall - Chief Marketing Officer

Gannon leads global marketing and product strategy efforts for Kyte, including overall market strategy and business models, corporate communications, product roadmap, messaging and branding.

Gannon is an award winning marketing professional, bringing to the company 15 years experience in both emerging and established consumer internet and enterprise technology. Prior to joining Kyte, Gannon was Principal at Horn Group, Inc., a premier digital marketing and public relations agency with offices in San Francisco, New York, Boston and Washington DC. As head of the agency’s New York office, Gannon was responsible for client strategy, business development and operations. Under Gannon’s leadership the New York office won several prestigious branding, digital marketing and public relations awards.

Prior to Horn Group, Gannon led Hall Consulting, an award winning San Francisco interactive design, development and marketing consultancy that he founded in 1994. Clients included a diverse set of emerging and established enterprise software companies including Vitria, AvantGo (Sybase), Commerce One, and PlaceWare (Microsoft).

Gannon began his career as a web consultant for companies including Pacific Telesis Group and US Web San Francisco, where he helped architect first generation websites for clients including Rolling Stone Magazine, Proxim and Flextronics.

Anne Dorman - Chief Financial Officer

Anne is in charge of finances, legal, and administrative affairs and brings over 30 years of Silicon Valley high-tech entrepreneurship experience to Kyte.

Anne has served as CFO of Advent Software, Ascend Communications (merged with Lucent, 1999), Atomic Vision (pre-IPO merger with Red Hat, 1999), Automattic, Cholestech, HealthCentral, Industrial Origami, Devicescape, Silicon Spice (merged with Broadcom, 2000), SKOLAR (merged with Wolters Kluwer), Sphere, Synaptics, Treasury Services Corporation (merged with Oracle, 1997), among many others.

Prior to that, she was employed by Arthur Young & Company (predecessor to Ernst & Young) from 1976 to 1985, where she was a founding member of the firm’s Entrepreneurial Services Group.

Anne is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA), holds an MBA, and is member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants.

Peter Schuepbach - Managing Director Europe

Peter Schuepbach began his entrepreneurial career as co-founder of Miracle Software AG in 1986, serving as Chief Executive Officer for more than 10 years. He grew the organization in 14 years to a $30M/350 employee software company in more than 5 countries. In 1999 the company went public as one of the most successful IPOs in the Swiss New Market.

In 1998 Peter was appointed to the advisory committee of softNet, an initiative of the Swiss Federal Office for Education and Technology. Peter was a co-initiator of the Swiss Software Association swissSOFT merged later to simsa.

After a serious accident of his brother in 2001, Peter took over the software company GenevaLogic. He restructured the organization and refocused on classroom management software, growing the company within 4 years to a highly profitable market leader in the niche market of educational software for schools. He handed over the CEO position of GenevaLogic in fall 2006 to Kirk Greiner, President of the US subsidiary, and serves since as Chairman.

For several years Peter has been active as an angel investor in internet and software start-up companies. Among those investments, he was lead investor in very successful internet companies in Europe such as xing.com, plazes.com and studiVZ.net. As reward for his outstanding engagement in new start-up companies he received the award “Business Angel of the Year 2005” from the Swiss Association of Business Angels.