Nickhil Jakatdar; CEO and Co-Founder
Prior to Vuclip, Nickhil was the President and COO of Praesagus, a MIT incubated start-up that he helped grow to becoming the most widely used design-to-manufacturing modeling software in its class, before its acquisition by Cadence Design Systems. Post-acquisition, Nickhil became Engineering Group Director at Cadence where he ran the entire Manufacturing Modeling Group. Prior to Praesagus, Nickhil helped found and served on the board of directors of CommandCAD, an electrical CAD company that was acquired two years after its founding. Prior to CommandCAD, Nickhil co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Nickhil served as CTO and VP of Marketing and Products as the company grew to become the industry standard in the field of scatterometry, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. Nickhil remained at TEL for 3 years as Sr. Director of Technology and Marketing.
Nickhil received his M.S. and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley and has been the recipient of many awards from various organizations, including the IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions in Semiconductor Manufacturing for 2001, the Berkeley Distinguished Pioneer Award, the NSF and MICRO fellowships and the Most Outstanding Student award at the College of Engineering, Pune. He has been featured in several articles published in the United States and in India. He has to his credit more than 30 patents and 20 conference papers.
Zhigang Chen; CTO, VP of Engineering and Co-Founder
Zhigang is responsible for Vuclip's technology direction and engineering operations. He co-founded XinLab in 2004 to bring Internet multimedia applications to mobile devices. Zhigang has over 15 years of experience in research and development of Internet and mobile multimedia. While working toward his doctorate in 1995 at the University of Illinois, Zhigang co-founded the first Web-based video streaming company, Vosaic. After Vosaic was acquired by VTEL in 1999, he served as Principal Engineer at VTEL to oversee the technology transition between the two companies. Zhigang became an independent consultant after VTEL. He was responsible for the engineering development for Caw Network's (acquired by Spirent) award-winning streaming media testing product line.
Zhigang received his BS and MS degree in computer science from Tianjin University in China and University of Louisiana at Lafayette, respectively. He earned a PhD in computer science from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His research papers have appeared in publications such as IEEE Transaction on Computers and World Wide Web Journal. He is the co-author of a widely referenced paper in streaming media on the Web that received the best paper award in 1995 at the Fourth International Conference on the World Wide Web.
Xinhui Niu; President and Co-Founder
Prior to Vuclip, Xinhui was an angel investor focusing on high-technology and media start-ups in China. He also produced a Chinese movie, "Curiosity Kills the Cat", which won the 2007 Golden Rooster Best Actress Award. In 1998, Xinhui co-founded Timbre Technologies, a semiconductor manufacturing start-up, that won the first-ever Berkeley Business Plan competition, leading to a successful venture-backed financing. Xinhui served as Chief Technologist in Timbre Technologies, before being acquired by Tokyo Electron Ltd. He remained at TEL for 3 years to oversee the company's technology development efforts.
Xinhui received his B.S. from University of Science and Technology of China, M.S. from University of Notre Dame and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley. Xinhui received the 2001 IEEE Best Paper Award in the area of Transactions on Semiconductor Manufacturing for the "Specular Spectroscopic Scatterometry" invention. He has to his credit more than 30 patents and 20 conference papers.
Craig Gatarz; Chief Administrative Officer
Prior to Vuclip, Craig served as Chief Operating Officer and General Counsel of JAMDAT Mobile Inc., a leading publisher of wireless interactive entertainment, from October 2000 through May 2006. During his tenure, JAMDAT grew from a start-up with fewer than ten employees to a global wireless publisher with more than 400 employees in seven locations around the world, and annual revenues exceeding $100 million. He was a member of the senior management team responsible for leading JAMDAT's successful $100 million initial public offering on the NASDAQ National Market in September 2004 and the sale of the company to Electronic Arts in March 2006 for $680 million.
Prior to his tenure at JAMDAT, Craig served for two years as General Counsel of Netgateway, Inc., a B2B e-commerce provider located in Long Beach, CA. From 1987 to 1999, Craig practiced corporate law in New York and Los Angeles with Jones Day, one of the world's largest law firms, with an emphasis on corporate finance, governance and restructurings. Craig has also advised and counseled numerous start-ups in Southern California on financing, legal and operational issues.
Craig has a BA in Political Science from Boston College and a Juris Doctorate from the University Of Virginia School Of Law.
