Blue Lava

Office: 55 Merchant St, 17th Floor
Honolulu HI 96813
USA

Tel: (808) 954 6262
Fax: (808) 954 6149

Email:

www.bluelavatech.com

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Lead Image

Blue Lava is a Hawaii based venture founded by passionate entrepreneurs frustrated with their personal photo collections. The idea for Blue Lava started with Henk (one of our founders), when his daughter was getting married in 2005. Henk had over 5000 pictures just from the wedding plus thousands and thousands of his own photos. They were a mess. He had way too many photos and no time to organize them, much less enjoy them.

It didn’t take us long to figure out that he wasn’t the only one, so we decided to do something about it. Our initial frustration has turned into a deep passion to bring digital media out of the shoebox and back into people’s lives.

Meet the team

  • Image of Lorenz

    Lorenz Sell

    Lorenz is co-founder and CEO at Blue Lava. When he's not doing deals or spreading the iLovePhotos photo-love, he's thinking about how to be even lazier about managing his photos. Lorenz keeps us a well oiled machine by way of caffeinated food-runs, purchasing new video games, funky personal fashion statements featuring pink, and the occasional fund-raising. He also likes lifting heavy things and eating lots of protein. Lorenz's Blog »

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    Chad Podoski

    Chad leads the Cocoa application development at Blue Lava. When able to break free from the infinite loop of all things Cupertino, he enjoys photography, surfing, and rock climbing.

  • Image of Derrick

    Derrick Petzold

    Derrick's that crazy person in the picture to the left. We try to keep him chained up in the cave as much as possible where he spends his days (and nights) analyzing XML for validity errors.

  • Image of George

    George McBay

    George writes ActionScript 3/Flash code at Blue Lava, but if you call him a "Flash Programmer" he'll punch you in the face. He was writing 6502 assembly language before you were born, on a computer with barely enough memory to hold the data contained in the thumbnail image of him shown here. Now get off his lawn, you little snot-nosed punk.

  • Image of Oliver

    Oliver Beattie

    Oliver is a Python hacker and designer from the UK who spends his days chained to his desk churning out tasty Python/Django concoctions for iLovePhotos on the Commodore 64 we kindly let him use. On the off occasion he manages to flee the building, he seems to enjoy photography… Oliver's Blog »

  • Image of Jason

    Jason Skicewicz

    Jason is the CTO at Blue Lava during the hours of noon and 6pm. As soon as the sun goes down, he morphs into hacker working on every component of the system from website to desktop app. He occasionally must be dragged out of sleeping the day away to attend board meetings after a long night of hackery. In his spare time, he devises plans on how to make our platform better and cleaner so that he may have spare time.

  • Image of Cory

    Cory Shaw

    Cory is the user experience guru at Blue Lava. He can usually be found conjuring up an arsenal of wireframes and user feedback to ensure that you feel loved when you try right-clicking over that photo of your long lost friend. In his free time Cory enjoys twisting the knobs on his synthesizer and getting his sinuses cleaned out regularly by the island swells.

  • Image of Darin

    Darin Valenzona

    Darin is one of the Cocoa developers for the iLovePhotos desktop application. On the occasional break where he's not coding while hopped up on Red Bull and Rice Krispy treats, he can usually be found napping while the TV watches him…

  • Image of Michael

    Michael Whalen

    Michael is the dude who sits in the corner playing overly-loud music all day long. Wannabe Bike Messenger, Hacker day and night, Michael pushes pixels and bakes up hot n' steamy CSS and XHTML as the lead iLovePhotos designer with his Ronco Rotisserie oven. Michael's Blog »

  • Image of Katharine

    Katharine Osborne

    Katharine moonlights as general QA Girl Friday at Blue Lava. She is also a photographer, a published author, teaches database design online, and tries not to look too much like a wounded seal while surfing badly in Waikīkī. Katharine's Blog »

Directors & Advisors

  • Image of Henk

    Henk Rogers

    Henk is co-founder and Chairman of Blue Lava Technologies. Considered one of the visionaries of the video game industry, the world's fastest growing entertainment segment today, Henk Rogers helped change the face of the industry as the entrepreneur responsible for bringing Tetris, one of world’s greatest games, to the U.S and international market.

    In 2002, Henk founded Blue Lava Wireless, bringing Tetris to the mobile platform. After becoming one of the top mobile phone game publishers in the U.S., Blue Lava Wireless was acquired by Jamdat.

    Henk’s other companies include Blue Planet Software, which holds the exclusive intellectual property rights to Tetris, Blue Planet Foundation, which is committed to the mission of stewarding environmental responsibility through developing non-carbon clean energy sources, and Avatar Reality, which is building the next generation massively multi-player virtual-world based on Mars.

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    Bob Lloyd

    An extremely successful businessman and former basketball player, Bob Lloyd has served as chairman of the board for The V Foundation for Cancer Research since 1994.

    Lloyd was the chairman and CEO of Mindscape, a developer and publisher of entertainment, educational and reference consumer software for personal computers, from 1990-95. He spent the following two years as the company’s non-executive chairman of the board.

    Before taking over as chairman and CEO at Mindscape, Lloyd served as president and CEO of Data East, Inc., from 1982-90. He previously worked as senior vice president of sales and marketing at Curley-Bates, Inc., and as vice president of sales and manager of market planning and research for Spalding Sports Company. Lloyd began his business career as a district representative for General Electric.

  • Image of Bill

    Bill Jarvis

    Bill Jarvis is the president and CEO of Mobi PCS where he oversees the development of long-term strategic goals as well as daily operations. Most recently, Mr. Jarvis served as president & CEO of GoBeam, a leading provider of hosted PBX communication services. Prior to heading GoBeam, Mr. Jarvis was regional president/area president of the Western United States for Nextel Communications. In that role, he was responsible for the $1.8 billion operating region, leading a team of 1,200 employees in four states.

    A 20-year veteran of the wireless industry, Mr. Jarvis began his career at McCaw Cellular Communications, where he rose to the position of Vice President of Marketing & Sales for The California-Nevada Region.

  • Image of Lorenz

    Lorenz Sell

    Lorenz is co-founder & CEO of Blue Lava Technologies. Prior to Blue Lava, Lorenz was co-founder at New Direct Ideas, an award-winning online direct marketing company based in Boston. In 2004, New Direct received the New England Direct Marketing Association’s Award for Creative Excellence in Interactive Marketing, beating Digitas for first place.

    He comes from an extensive background in both software development and direct marketing. Lorenz received his BS in Computer Engineering from Tufts University, after having lived in 7 countries and visited over 30. He is also the founder of Beer and Business, a successful Hawaii-based Web 2.0 networking event that connects local investors, executives, and entrepreneurs in a casual environment.

    Lorenz & Henk founded Blue Lava in December 2005 with a mission to help people deal with their ever-growing and overwhelming digital photo collections. Lorenz's passion is to enable people to enjoy their photos as effortlessly as they take them.