Kaltura’s Blog

The Kaltura blog has a few “regular” bloggers as well as a group of guest bloggers that will contribute from time to time. Our bloggers all have a great deal of experience, knowledge and insights about group video making, peer production, open source technology, online marketing and more.

Ron Yekutiel, Kaltura CEO and Co-founder

Work: Ron is a serial technology entrepreneur starting companies in Israel, US, and Canada in the fields of Internet, mobile applications, and security.

Fun: A former helicopter pilot, Ron loves traveling to authentic locations (Papua New Guinea and the Amazon are his favorites) and being breathless - shark feeding scuba diving, parachuting, bungee etc…

More: Ron holds an MBA with honors from the Wharton School of Business majoring both in Finance and Entrepreneurial Management.

Shay David, Kaltura CTO and Co-founder

Work: Shay brings many years of experience in technology ventures, starting companies and helping large enterprises turn ideas into working products.
Previous projects included MindEcho, Destinator and consulting with companies like Toyota.

Fun: Shay wrote his PhD dissertation at Cornell, focusing like many of his other articles on collaborative systems and the reputation economy. Shay loves to travel around the world and meet people that are helping bring the open source revolution to various parts of the economy.

More: Shay is also a fellow at Yale Law School’s Information Society Project where he contributes to the global Access to Knowledge movement.

Michal Tsur, Kaltura President and Co-founder

Work: Michal is an experienced entrepreneur with many years of knowledge of technology startup work. Michal co-founded Cyota and was part of its management team from its inception up until its acquisition by RSA Security, Inc (NASDAQ: RSAS) for $145M (US) in 2005 (RSA was subsequently acquired by EMC Inc (NYSE: EMC)).

Fun: Michal was a competitive swimmer, and triathlete, she loves hiking and is the mom of Yonatan and Yulie.

More: Michal holds a doctoral degree in application of game theoretic models to law from New York University, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Yale Law School at the Information Society Project, where her research focused on Open Source, Memetics, and evolutionary game-theory. Michal also clerked at the supreme court of Israel.

Ainatte Inbal, Kaltura Head of Product

Work: Ainatte is in charge of product at Kaltura. For over a decade, she has intravenously fed herself with all things Net related, starting out in the mid Nineties as the coordinator of a distance learning program; Other benchmarks include: an R&D strategic group at AOL, producing art projects at the wonderful, now defunct, adaweb; graduate studies at NYU’s ITP; head of Interaction Design in the local IDEO office; independent user experience consultant to startups during their concept phase.

Fun: Ainatte has been teaching user experience design for the past 7 years in the hope that the next generation of designers will treat our friend the user with kindness and compassion.

Michael Dale, Kaltura Senior Developer and Project Administrator

Work: Michael Dale is working with Kaltura and  Wikimedia to bring rich collaborative media to Wikipedia.  Michael’s work at the University of California focused on the conception and development of Metavid; a wiki based media annotation and search system.  Michael has been involved in open media adoption on the web, helps organize the FOMS (Foundation of Open Media Software) conference, is on the board of the Annodex Foundation, and is an advocate for open media support in web browsers.

Fun: Michael likes tinkering with open source software, traveling, home-brewing, working for social change, and has a cat.

Guest Bloggers

Yochai Benkler

Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society

Work: Yochai is a law professor who has been writing about the commons in information, and about collaboration and peer production for a long time. More about Yochai: http://www.benkler.org/Bio.html ;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yochai_Benkler.

Fun: Writing 180,000 word books…

Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor, Department of Media, Culture & Communication, New York University

Work: Gabriella Coleman is an anthropologist who examines the role of the law and new media technologies in extending liberal values and sustaining new forms of political activism. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU and teaches courses on digital media, the co-construction of society and technology, and human communication. She is completing a book manuscript “Coding Liberal Freedom: Hacker Pleasure and the Ethics of Free and Open Source Software” and is starting a new project on patient activism and peer to peer knowledge production on the Internet.

Fun: Gabriella loves doing research on geeks and hackers, especially spending time with them during their week long conferences. When she can, she also likes to leave the urban jungle to spend time away from her computer, and do the type of things she used to spend a lot of her time doing: swimming, scuba diving, hiking, and sailing.

David V. Picker

David Picker is a third generation motion picture executive and producer. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree from Dartmouth College in 1953.

He joined United Artists Corporation in January 1956, managed a series of businesses including Production and Marketing, United Artists Music Publishing and held the Presidency of United Artists Records.

He was named President and Chief Operating Officer of United Artists Corporation in 1969 and Chief Executive Officer in 1970. He was responsible for bringing to the company films such as TOM JONES, the JAMES BOND series, the WOODY ALLEN movies, The Beatles’ HARD DAY’S NIGHT and HELP, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, LAST TANGO IN PARIS and many other films.

Mr. Picker is a member of the Writer’s Guild of America East, The Producers Guild of America and is Chairman of the Producers Guild of America East. He has served on many boards and committees, including The American Film Institute, The Brooklyn Academy of Music, The Board of Overseers of The Hopkins Center of the Performing Arts and The Hood Museum of Dartmouth College, among others.