Director of Technology at Aardvark Media
Croydon, United Kingdom
- Current
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- Director of Technology at Aardvark Media
- Board member at SpatialQ
- Past
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- Director of Operations / Architect at Edgeio
- Director of Engineering at Edgeio Inc.
- European Billing Engineering Manager at Yahoo Europe
- Head of Development at Global Name Registry
- Co-founder / Head of Development at Nameplanet
- Technical Director at Screen Media
- Senior Developer at Telepost Inc
- Co-founder / Executive Director / Technical Manager at Norconnect Internet Serivices
- Education
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- The Open University
- The Open University
- University of Oslo
- Recommended
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2 people have recommended Vidar - Connections
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129
connections
- Industry
- Internet
- Websites
Vidar Hokstad’s Summary
- Experienced manager with a proven track record from multiple startups, including as co-founder and director.
- Been directly involved in securing angel and VC financing for companies I've been involved in, and carrying out due dilligence related to investments and asset sales.
- Key strengths include the ability to take a high level strategic view of the business and take initiative to develop on that.
- From a software engineering viewpoint the ability to quickly translate key strategies into overarching IT architectures, and implement solutions that will support the business goals.
- Particularly at home in challenging startup environments, and enjoy taking on multiple and wide ranging roles.
My main interests at the moment include software project management and extending my leadership skills, and innovative communications systems in the widest sense, from user interaction and usability, through network services to programming language- and compiler design.
For a more personal touch see my blog at www.hokstad.com
Vidar Hokstad’s Specialties:
Software design,team leadership, project management,e-mail systems, billing systems, domain names,network services,XML,semantic web,XSL,C++,Linux, Ruby
Vidar Hokstad’s Experience
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Director of Technology
Aardvark Media
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Information Technology and Services industry)
January 2008 — Present (5 months)
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Board member
SpatialQ
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
December 2007 — Present (6 months)
Participate in the development of the business plan, strategy and product requirements, and provide technical/architecture input on the product prototype.
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Director of Operations / Architect
Edgeio
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
July 2007 — December 2007 (6 months)
* Responsible for operational stability including 24/7 monitoring; deploying Edgeio's platform; hiring operations personell.
* Architectural overview of the software platform. -
Director of Engineering
Edgeio Inc.
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
February 2006 — July 2007 (1 year 6 months)
Building a top quality engineering team and architecting and managing the development of a highly scalable and user friendly solutions for content aggregation from blogs.
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European Billing Engineering Manager
Yahoo Europe
(Public Company; 10,001 or more employees; YHOO; Internet industry)
June 2003 — February 2006 (2 years 9 months)
Managing the engineering and application operations of the billing solution handling Yahoo! Europe's premium services through significant growth.
The key focus of this position was to ensure Yahoo!'s Eropean properties have access to a high quality billing platform to allow them to grow their premium services at a high rate, and ensuring the integrity of what is quickly becoming one of Yahoo! Europe's major revenue sources. -
Head of Development
Global Name Registry
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
October 2000 — May 2003 (2 years 8 months)
After the sale of the Nameplanet assets, GNR successfully obtained the license to operate the ".name" top level domain. I was heavily involved in writing GNR's contract with ICANN, and design and management of the development of the registry system required to operate the new top level domain.
I then managed the design and development of the Personal Names domain registrar platform provided by GNR as an experimental platform for distributors. -
Co-founder / Head of Development
Nameplanet
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
March 2000 — October 2000 (8 months)
Came up with the idea of an e-mail service for personalised adressed together with Geir Rasmussen, and was closely involved with developing the business plan that eventually led to founding Nameplanet. Designed the initial prototype of the mail solution, and managed the development team through launch and significant expansion.
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Technical Director
Screen Media
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
January 1999 — December 1999 (1 year)
First permanent employee; responsible for building Screen Media's initial development team working on a leading edge web pad product and designing the original software platform for the product.
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Senior Developer
Telepost Inc
(Privately Held; 11-50 employees; Internet industry)
January 1998 — December 1998 (1 year)
Worked on security and PIM integration at Teleposts European subsidiary as part of a leading edge unified messaging platform.
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Co-founder / Executive Director / Technical Manager
Norconnect Internet Serivices
(Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Internet industry)
January 1995 — December 1997 (3 years)
Helped force through a major price drop on ISP services in Norway by providing effective competition through an agressive build up of local dial up POPs. Consulting for Norwegian Defense Research Establishment and others.
Vidar Hokstad’s Education
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The Open University
MSc CCI, Computer Science, 2006 — 2007
The study was a distance learning program in addition to my full time job. My dissertation was on the use of binary morphological filters and statistical averaging to reduce the error rate optical character recognition.
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The Open University
PGD CCI, Computing, 2003 — 2005
Postgraduate Diploma in Computing for Commerce and Industry.The study is a mix of mostly computer science and technical management subjects with some additional business oriented options. Courses taken include among others: project management, information security management, object oriented analysis and design, relation database management, distributed applications and e-commerce. This was a part time study in addition to my full time job, and was taken as a part of the requirements for the OO MSc. programme.
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University of Oslo
N/A, Computer Science, May 1994 — May 1995
Completed a year of CS studies at UiO before dropping out to found my first company.
Additional Information
Vidar Hokstad’s Websites:
Vidar Hokstad’s Interests:
compiler design,development management,new technology,investing,information systems,AI,knowledge systems,playing the piano,reading,writing,languages
Vidar Hokstad’s Groups:
ACCU,
BCS PROMS-G (BCS Project Management Specialist Group),
Lonix (London Linux user group)
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Forbes.com Entrepreneurs member
Vidar Hokstad’s Contact Settings
Interested In:
- new ventures
- job inquiries
- expertise requests
- business deals
- reference requests
- getting back in touch
