Amr co-founded VivaSmart in June of 1999. Yahoo! acquired VivaSmart in June 2000, and uses the VivaSmart technology as the core of the Yahoo! shopping service. Amr served as Vice President of Engineering, and led a team that used Hadoop extensively for data analysis and business intelligence across the Yahoo! online services. Amr holds Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University, Egypt, and a Doctorate in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Damien Katz is the creator of CouchDB and founder of CouchOne. He began his engineering career working on Lotus Notes for Iris Associates, acquired by IBM. Further work at MySQL cemented his database engineering credibility. With a number of patents under his belt and broad acknowledgement of the superior sync capabilities of Notes, Damien set out to create a new kind of database better suited to the needs of web and cloud computing.

In April, 2005 he posted on his blog about a new database engine he was working on, stating it would be a "storage system for a large scale object database" and that it would be called CouchDB (Cluster Of Unreliable Commodity Hardware). It was designed from the ground up to serve web applications and was written the Erlang OTP platform because of its world class reliability and concurrency. In 2008, it became a top-level Apache project maintained at the Apache Software Foundation. In 2009, Damien, along with J. Chris Anderson and Jan Lehnardt, founded CouchOne. The initial investment is from Redpoint Ventures.

Razi has more than 20 years of management experience in product/solution development from concept to release in various disciplines. Razi brings to Xeround expertise in visionary and strategic marketing as well as driving products to market from positioning through go-to-market to delivery.

Prior to joining Xeround, Razi led the strategic transition from traditional data centers to cloud computing at BMC Software; a leading provider of data center & IT management solutions encompassing BSM.

Prior to that, Razi led the Incubator business unit focused on Distributed Transaction Management. Prior to BMC, Razi held senior positions as VP of R&D at Commtouch Technology (at the time amongst the largest web mail providers), senior Director of Product Management/Marketing at Starhome – a worldwide leader of VAS for mobile roaming users, and approximately 8 years in various roles at Microsoft in Redmond, WA and later in Israel.

Razi holds an M.A. (cum laude) from the Tel Aviv University in Philosophy of Information and Digital Culture, an MBA in Marketing and a bachelor’s degree in Economics.

Roger heads the West Coast Operations for 10gen. He has over 20 years of experience of building and delivering great and innovative products to market and has deep expertise and knowledge of database architectures and internals. Roger holds several patents for database and middleware technology. His experience leading product development and engineering teams includes 12 years with Oracle's Database and Application Server development organization where he pioneered products that delivered heterogeneous interoperability, as well as several years as SVP of product operations and engineering at Apple's PowerSchool division. Roger also held leadership positions at OuterBay and Efficient Frontier. He earned a Bachelor's degree in computer science from the HogeSchool Enschede.

Simon Guest is the Senior Director of Technical Strategy in the Developer and Platform Evangelism (DPE) organization at Microsoft, responsible for helping developers worldwide deliver solutions using Microsoft technologies.

Since joining Microsoft in 2001, Simon has led the Microsoft Platform Architecture Team, acted as Editor-in-Chief of the Microsoft Architecture Journal, pioneered the area of .NET and Java 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) interoperability, worked with customers on mission critical .NET solutions, and has been a regular speaker at many conferences worldwide, including PDC, TechEd, and JavaOne.

Before joining Microsoft, and with over 18 years in the IT industry, Simon held architect-level positions at many organizations, including Zoho Corporation, a Silicon Valley startup; Conchango, a UK based consultancy; and Herbert Smith, a leading law firm in the UK. He also worked for several years at GEC in its semiconductor manufacturing division.

Simon was born in England, and has been living in the U.S. for approximately nine years. He holds a Masters Degree in IT Security from the University of Westminster, London, and a Higher National Certificate in Software Engineering from Plymouth College. Simon is the author of numerous technical articles and books about Java, Microsoft .NET, and Web technologies, as well as maintaining a blog at http://simonguest.com.

Simon’s LinkedIn profile can be found here.