Dan Harple
Entrepreneur
Founder,
Chairman &
CEO
Dan Harple's latest role is as CEO
& Managing Partner of Shamrock Ventures, BV, based in Amsterdam,
The Netherlands. Shamrock Ventures, BV provides strategic
guidance to structure, start, and navigate companies from inception to
liquidity events. It helps position the companies for strategic
investors; provide technology transfer to/from the Netherlands/EU and
USA; provide venture capital investment via our venture capital
relationships; provide Investment Banking relationships to maximize
liquidity; and, provide Operating Management Services to new and
high-growth EU and USA-based enterprises.
Prior to this, Dan was
Founder, Chairman and CEO of Context
Media,
Inc., an enterprise
software firm he founded in 1999. Context Media's purpose was to
materially improve the way all digital media (unstructured data)
is discovered and accessed within disparate enterprise content
repositories and systems. The company won
numerous industry awards (eWeek, Seybold, Demo, etc.) and was the
seminal industry player in defining the Enterprise Content Integration
(ECI) market segment. The company differentiated itself with its
patented "pipeline technology," designed and built as an open
interoperable services oriented architecture (SOA) for disparate
content systems real time integration. The product set enabled
enterprise wide collaboration and access to content previously locked
in disparate silos, i.e., the "unified view." Key customers
spanned multiple beach head market segments- Sony, Bertelsmann (Media
& Entertainment), CMP (Publishing), Citigroup (Financial Services),
and General Dynamics, among others.
Context Media was successfully acquired by Oracle Corporation in July 2005, forming the basis for Oracle's Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) strategy, and is now a foundational element embedded across multiple product lines: the Oracle Collaboration Suite, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Enterprise search, and Oracle Data Hubs. Additional information on the acquisition with Oracle can be found here. Competitive variants of this technology now exist in products such as Google's Search Appliance.
Context
Media's investors included leading venture capital firms and corporate
partners. The following firms provided funding to the Company- New Enterprise Associates, Adams Capital Management, Macromedia, Inc., Lehman Brothers,
and Silicon Valley Bank.
Post-Netscape, Dan's efforts centered on media research in a new company that he co-founded with Todd Rundgren, Context Labs. Context Labs focused on exploring and developing technologies to enhance our daily media experiences (audio, video, music, etc.), in the convergence of traditional media delivery systems with the web. This research led to Dan's founding of Context Media, emphasizing the enterprise access and distribution of distributed disparately located media and related unstructured data. The Context Labs research vehicle involved conceptualizing and collaborating on Patronet.com, an on-line entertainment/relationship concept, with the interactive artist and musician Todd Rundgren, and his firm, Waking Dreams. Patronet technology seeded the industry for artist media interactivity, influencing early successful sites by Peter Gabriel and David Bowie, and subsequently became the core technology for Artistent.com, the onetime online entertainment portal founded by former Atlantic Records president, Danny Goldberg.
Formerly, a
Senior Vice President at Netscape,
where he reported to the CEO, Dan
merged the company
he founded, InSoft, with Netscape in late 1995. InSoft developed
the first
generation of Internet media streaming and Internet telephony/
collaborative
applications. These products resulted in NetscapeConference,
and the Netscape
Media Server. This work provided the seminal contribution to
the Real
time streaming protocol (RTSP).
Mr.
Harple was also instrumental in putting together the first generation industry
wide
group to focus on interoperable real time audio and video. Core
components
of this work on collaborative computing and streaming media resulted in
a
significant patent
in these areas.
Multiple "firsts" came of the InSoft/
Netscape relationship; (1) first commercially available shared white
board,
(2) Netscape LiveMedia
Developer's Platform, (3) Netscape LiveAudio,
(4) Netscape
LiveVideo,
(5)
Major telephony integration efforts
with Lucent,
(6) Work on the Real time Protocol (RTP),
and H.323
Standards. InSoft's application, Communique!,
was the industry's first commerical-grade VoIP multipoint audio/video
collaborative conferencing product.
These technologies now provide some of the core infrastructure for the
way
multimedia and real-time interactive communications are utilized on the
Internet, e.g., Webex, NetMeeting, SKYPE, etc., and
offered the first
commercial
products integrating the convergence of traditional telephony services
with the
internet protocol (IP).
Dan's
other efforts are multi-faceted; the creation and nurturing of new
companies
via personal and investment-related vehicles, K-12 education/technology
integration,
and advisor to several Venture Capital firms. One educational effort,
as
Trustee and Chair of the Technology Committee at the Harrisburg Academy
resulted in the
school being nominated as the "Technology Educator of the Year" for
the state of Pennsylvania. Further work at HA resulted in a
consortium between PBS, Intel, and
the school to explore the
integration
of high definition television (HDTV) with the web. Dan also
served at The
Friends Academy (Dartmouth, MA), as Trustee, and on the finance
committee and
chair of the Technology committee.
He continues to serve as Trustee and Chair of the Technology
Committee
at Tabor Academy in Marion, MA.
Work derived from a lecture he gave at the Pennsylvania
Information
Superhighway Consortium resulted in a white paper that defined
several
of the technology platforms for then Governor Tom Ridge's statewide
initiative on high technology. Rhode Island Governor Lincoln
Almond
appointed Dan to the Rhode Island State Economic Policy Council
in September 2000.
Prior
to InSoft, Dan's career focused on 3 Dimensional Computer-Aided Design
and
Analysis, in the context of Concurrent Engineering and Ergonomic
Design.
He held positions with: AMP Incorporated (now part of TYCO),
Ingersoll-Rand,
Raytheon Company, and the Naval Underwater Systems Center. He
attended Marlboro College, and
holds both B.A
(psychology) and B.S.M.E. (mechanical engineering) degrees from the University of Rhode Island, where he
also
completed extensive graduate-level work in psychology and mechanical
engineering.
Dan
has previously (and currently) serves on several boards: The New Bedford
Aquarium Corporation, the Friends
Academy, and currently, the Tabor
Academy. He served as an advisor and early stage
board
member for the network infrastructure company, Tazz Networks.
He
serves on various technical advisory boards: Tabor Academy, The Friends Academy, and The Marlboro College Graduate Center,
He is
an advisor, collaborator and/or investor in several technology venture
capital firms,
including
Adams Capital Management, New Enterprise Associates, Newbridge Networks Venture
Investments,
Zoe Capital, Charles
River Ventures, The
Slater
Center for Interactive Technologies, Vantage
Point Partners, Rockridge Capital
Partners, and Valhalla
Partners. He has an extensive list of publications, along
with
a long list of public speaking at events such as COMDEX,
Networld/Interop,
Internet World, SunWorld, Content World, Seybold, McQuillan Next
Generation
Networks Conference, and Commencements,
etc. He has received numerous awards, including Inc.
Magazines's Entrepreneur of the Year, the Red Herring Watch Award, the Upside Hot Startup Award, and the NEA Presidents Award.
Dan's
recreational pursuits include sailing, architectural and systems
design, historic
property restoration, vintage sports car racing, guitar, piano, skiing,
and, enjoying
his family with his wife Caren and their five children. He
released a CD of original music, Nederland
2006, in the summer of 2006.
He
can be reached by email at dan@harple.com.