Ram Singh

Principal / Entrepreneur

id8 inc

Jul 2022 - current

While providing product development mentorship/consulting for startup, scaleup, and established enterprise clients, I am also conducting my own customer discovery and technology R&D for a potential new startup.

Interim CTO

REAL Engagement and Loyalty

Feb 2022 - Jun 2022

REAL's core business hypothesis is that matching the emotional characteristics of advertisements to the movie and television scenes viewed just before and after ad-breaks improves the viewing experience for audiences and delivers better return on investment (ROI) and brand safety for advertisers. This content-based approach to contextual ad targeting could supplement behavioral targeting or be useable in scenarios where behavioral targeting is not desired or possible. Challenge: Help position the team to raise investment and/or generate recurring, sustainable revenue. My three key objectives/accomplishments: • Assessed potential scalability, operability, and performance of the existing AI/ML implementation. • Identified key hypotheses to be tested during a customer discovery phase leading towards achieving product-market fit (PMF). • Proposed an AI/ML technology and product roadmap that establishes a “minimal testable product” (MTP) and evolves to "minimal viable product" (MVP).

Senior Director, various titles

Sinclair Broadcast Group

May 2016 - Mar 2021

Over five years, I had three titles: Senior Director of Engineering for the Innovation Labs, Senior Director of Product Strategy, and Senior Director of Products & Programs. I led cross-functional engineering and product teams at Sinclair Digital which delivered products and business models that extend Sinclair’s main ad-supported television business and contributed significant year-over-year ad revenue increases from 2016 to 2020.

Principal TPM

Amazon Web Services

Sep 2014 - May 2016

As part of diversifying into media production and distribution, Amazon extended into the gaming industry by acquiring Twitch, creating an internal game studio to produce and distribute both in-house games and third-party games, and developing new gaming development technology. I coordinated product development and launches for large, cross-functional, geographically distributed teams developing a new AAA game engine and related game development AWS services.

CEO/Founder

Afiniate

Sep 2011 - Aug 2014

I led an internationally distributed team of software engineers in developing novel software solutions for banking, financial services, healthcare, and infrastructure operations based on a highly scalable real-time complex event processing system. We also researched and developed technologies required for a field-deployable, ultra-low-power high-performance swarm protocol-based distributed computing systems that could be easily transported, deployed, and operated in support of military, peacekeeping, and disaster response operations, and other scenarios where IT infrastructure is either non-existent or cannot be trusted. Our last project was a reimagining of how a nonpartisan crowdsourced political campaign fundraising platform should work.

Principal/Founder

id8 inc

Jan 2002 - Aug 2011

I helped companies, organizations, and agencies (TS/SCI) transform their problems into opportunities and those opportunities into results. I did this by providing business, operations, and technical enterprise architecture consulting services to Fortune 500 and emerging companies and Federal and state agencies,

CTO / Co-Founder

Ecoustix

Jan 2001 - Dec 2001

We developed a legal, secure, high-quality personalized streaming music and digital concierge system for traveler. It was an early form of Spotify combined with smart speakers targeting the hospitality industry until wireless and mobile devices capabilities evolved. I did the architecture and led the product design and engineering teams in creating a secure system of networked Internet appliances and servers that legally and securely streamed highly-personalized digital music and audio content, coupled with a corresponding business model that would ensure equitable compensation for the rights holders of the music.

Director, Production and Software Development

Circle.com

Oct 1999 - Jan 2001

I built out a new Web consulting practice by merging a digital advertising and branding agency with a software engineering team.

Senior Consultant

Apple Inc.

Mar 1998 - Oct 1999

provided information and system architecture, product and program management, business development, marketing and sales modeling and software engineering consulting services to Apple’s Fortune 100 and Federal clients to rapidly scope, develop, deploy, and operate Web-based enterprise software solutions using the WebObjects server software framework.

Consultant

Shopping.com, various

Jan 1997 - Jan 1998

I provided system & information architecture, project management, business plan development, and investor support for various retail, entertainment, and travel clients. My achievements included leading a “tiger team” of six developers that achieved in three months what the two much larger teams that preceded mine were unable to — creating the E-commerce marketplace platform for zero-inventory retailer Shopping.com. Meeting this make-or-break deadline allowed the company to close an investment by Bill Gross and Idealab and a subsequent acquisition by Compaq for $220M.

VP of Engineering

Welcome To the Future, Inc.

Oct 1995 - Feb 1997

I was rapidly promoted from manager to lead the development of this startup's four products: a wireless interactive television platform, a cable-based interactive television platform, a low-cost Web appliance (pre-cursor to WebTV), and wireless 3D hand-held remote control (pre-cursor to Nintendo Wii Remote motion controller).

Software Engineer (TS/SCI)

IBM

Oct 1992 - Sep 1995

I served as the primary business and technical point of contact (POC) between prime and subcontractors. I also: * Designed, developed, and tested key components of a real-time system simulator. * Developed the process and systems to conduct “bulletproof” Software Integration and Test (SWIT) of major software subsystems. Installed and tested software at the prime contractor’s site. * Designed, developed and tested major subsystems on various software projects, including a customized UX/UI GUI builder, and data access interfaces, and logging/delogging software.

Engineer

Space Systems Laboratory

Jan 1991 - Oct 1992

I architected and developed the underwater proof-of-concept to a position tracking and control system for autonomous space-based robots. This included researching, designing, developing, and testing integrated hardware and software subsystems, including digital signal processing (DSP) systems, computer hardware interfaces, actuators and sensors, and fiber-optic communications.