Seminar 01 – The Evolving Mobile Publishing Ecosystem

Drew Griffin is the Mobile Program Manager for Elsevier. In this role he and his team help various internal development and product groups bring their mobile apps to market. These services include, participating in the design process, vendor selection, targeting platforms, recommending design and development tools and methodology, navigating App Store guidelines. Drew was previously a Senior Project Manager for Mobile Apps at Elsevier, and has 15 years of Software Engineering experience in the medical engineering and healthcare fields.

Mark Ruthman currently manages Electronic Product Development in the Department of Marketing & Publications of the American Academy of Pediatrics. DOMP produces numerous resources, ranging from evidence-based clinical manuals for health care professionals too books and educational brochures for parents. Mark focuses on electronic creation and delivery of this content and how to optimize the experience and functionality for members and customers; including mobile apps, eBooks, subscription Web sites, video, and interactive tools.

Richesh Ruchir is the Chief Technology Officer at Ruckus Media Group, a VC backed digital publishing startup focused on developing interactive mobile storybooks with built-in assessments for children. Ruckus has partnered with Hasbro, Crayola, SeaWorld, Scholastic, and other major brands to develop original content for mobile platforms. Richesh’s experience spans technical leadership roles at Kaplan and Blackboard where he led development of Kaplan Kids and Blackboard’s implementation at Florida’s Virtual School. Prior to focusing on education technology, Richesh was an Architect with global consulting firms Accenture and Booz Allen Hamilton where he led large scale application development. Richesh has a Computer Science degree from University of Maryland at College Park.

Paul Calvi has worked in the publishing industry for almost fifteen years. In that time he has worked for publishers as well as production houses. Since he started in publishing he has been fortunate to be deeply involved in the shift from traditional print publishing to online distribution and publishing systems and now the mobile revolution. He is currently the Director of Technology for Annual Reviews where he tries to take advantage of advances in technology to improve internal systems and processes as well as create improved products and services for customers.

Pamela Rigden Snead is Product Manager focused on the development of new mobile apps for the Chemical & Engineering News at the American Chemical Society.

A graduate of the University of Waterloo, Pam has more than 19 years of hands-on experience in the hi-tech sector in a variety of roles, from technical writing lead for the Word Perfect Suite at Corel Corporation to Quality Assurance Manager for Bell Canada’s international billing system. Pam has consulted as a Business Analyst, Quality Assurance Manager and Project Manager in the Information Technologies sector for several organizations prior to her work at ACS.

In addition to her hi-tech experience, Pam earned her M.Sc in Environmental Resource Management and has done volunteer work in the Amazonian region of South America working with indigenous communities on sustainable development and tourism initiatives. Pam is married to Tom, an officer in the United States Army, and mother of two active young boys.