Team

The Kachingle Team is an eclectic mix of talented people from the United States, Germany and France.

Many of us previously worked together.

  • Cynthia, Frank and Jens all previously worked at Sun Microsystems
  • Frank and Jens previously worked together at OpenGrid
  • Cynthia and Yves previously worked together at GolfWeb

You can reach any of us at firstname dot lastname at kachingle dot com. General contact information in contact section.

Cynthia Imig Typaldos

Founder and CEO

cynthia@kachingle.com
Office: 408-867-8875
Mobile: 650-215-8406 		Follow Cynthia on Twitter @typaldos @kachingle @freemiumsfbay
Read Cynthia's and Bunny's blog

Cynthia is a successful serial entrepreneur in social web endeavors. Her first internet venture was GolfWeb, which she co-founded despite not being a golfer. When it launched in early 1995, GolfWeb included reader reviews of golf courses and a find-a-playing-partner social networking service. GolfWeb became a major presence in the golf world and was acquired by CBS Sportsline in 1999. While at GolfWeb Cynthia envisioned and led the development of the GolfWeb Players Club, a subscription-based social application for golfers launched in August 1997. The Players Club had member profiles, a reputation system, integration with the golf course data base, and a sophisticated social application that allowed players to track their golf game statistics (in 20 different ways!) and compare themselves to others in groups.

Based on what she learned about social interaction at GolfWeb Cynthia founded RealCommunities, a way-too-early platform for social networking and online communities. Her 2001 manifesto on The 12 Principles of Civilization became a major white paper on defining the successful web features for online social interaction.

See also the article about the 12 Principles in Fast Company magazine, September 2000.

After doing some random consulting work in a variety of tech industries, and being one of the first people to predict the severe monetization challenges to the content, software and media industries as a result of digitization and the internet, in 2004 she got the idea for what is now Kachingle. At the time she recognized that it was too early and set it aside until 2008 when she initially started prototyping what is now the revolutionary Kachingle usage-based micropayment platform. She is the inventor on Kachingle’s patent pending application related to micropayments, and co-inventor on Kachingle’s patent pending application related to bundling.

Cynthia is a former director of product marketing & management, and director of standards at Sun Microsystems. She has taught courses in these subjects and online communities at the University of California Berkeley Extension. At Kachingle, she is particularly passionate about applying her knowledge and experience in creating de-facto standard platforms. Earlier in her career, she was a software developer at Bank of America.

Cynthia has a B.S. in chemistry from UC Berkeley, where she also attended graduate school in computer science, and an MBA from MIT.

Languages: American English, pathetic Spanish. Cynthia is a native Californian but has lived in Pasadena, Boston, Ivrea (Italy), Mount Vernon (MO), Panama and Silicon Valley.

Cynthia is also the founder and lead organizer of the Freemium Meetup Group – Freemium SF Bay Area

Frank Spies

CTO and Founder

Prior to Kachingle, Frank worked as an Architect/Developer at nVidia, as CTO at OpenGrid, as Architect & Lead Engineer at X1 Solutions, and as a development engineer at Sun Microsystems. He is an expert in startup web-based applications. Frank is a co-inventor on Kachingle’s patent pending application related to bundling.

Frank’s hobbies include 3D computer animation and squirrel training.

Frank has a BS & MS in Computer Science, University of Saarbruecken, Germany.

Languages: German (native speaker), American English. Originally from Itzehoe in Germany.

Frédéric Ranft

Interface Designer

Frédéric started designing webpages when he was 15 and all the cool kids had a website for their gaming clan and/or band. He has been studying communication design at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal (now Folkwang – Hochschule der Künste) with a focus on information architecture and interface design. He earned his Diplom in 2013.
The clean and easy-to-use Kachingle website is credited to Frédéric. Frédéric is a co-inventor on Kachingle’s patent pending application related to bundling.

Frédéric lives in Remscheid, Germany (near Cologne), and speaks German (native) and English (nearly native).

Daniel Reid

Director of Business Development

daniel@kachingle.com
Mobile: 760 576-9928

Daniel has more than 25 years of sales, marketing, business development and technology product experience. As VP of Marketing and Product Development, he was instrumental in the growth and sale of computational toxicology leader Health Designs to British scientific software firm Oxford Molecular Group. After that acquisition, he held positions in domestic and international sales and marketing at the firm, driving consistent growth in their worldwide revenue. Most recently, he is the Founder and co-owner of two very successful website development and marketing services firms. He has co-authored several peer-reviewed papers in the area of computational toxicology and software. He specializes in sales, e-business, branding, search engine optimization, go-to-market strategy, and e-marketing.

Daniel studied Mathematics at State University of New York at Buffalo. He is fluent in English, and holds his own very well when speaking Japanese.

Rob Blackwelder

Director of Site Operations & Quality Assurance

Rob's expertise is in Usability, Quality Assurance and Customer Support. He contributed significantly in these fields at both Xoom.com and Wine.com, as well as several other websites and startups. Rob has been instrumental in the delivery of our error-free site. You can often find him up late at night, doing extra testing or chasing down the cause of any little corner-case issue that sticks in his craw.

Rob's previous career was in film journalism. He spent 10 years self-syndicating film reviews and interviews to dozens of print, web and radio outlets.

Originally from Boulder, Colorado, Rob has lived in Oakland, California since 1990.

Paul Lefrois Jr.

CFO

Paul is a results-oriented, multi-faceted finance executive with an outstanding fifteen-year track record of financial and operational accomplishments. His previous posts include Controller at a startup nanotechnology company which he helped to take public; Director of Finance for a startup stem cell research company and at three intellectual property incubator companies; and, co-founder and Vice President of Finance and Administration of a fulfillment provider.

Paul graduated from St. Bonaventure University with a Bachelor of Business Administration in Finance. He was honored in 2008 by the Rochester Business Journal as a recipient of the prestigious Forty under 40 Award.

Jens Horstmann

Chairman of the Board of Directors

Jens is a veteran entrepreneur, angel investor and trusted advisor. Up until several years ago, he was also the CEO of DVDplay until he sold it to NCR, at which time he became the VP of Entertainment Technology at NCR. Previously he worked in various executive and management positions at Sun Microsystems, LSI Logic, Siemens, OpenGrid, and Ensemble.

Jens hobbies include piloting his own plane, photography and travel.

He has a BS & MS in EECS, University of Brauschweig, Germany and Stanford University.

Languages: German (native speaker), American English. Originally from Braunschweig in Germany.

Yves Huin

Director Kachingle Europe

Yves has deep international business development experience for U.S. and European companies in software, computer services, internet and communications. He also has expertise in business engineering and internet business models, international trade, and multi cultural project management.

He worked for many years for British Petroleum (BP) and has consulted for France Telecom, Oracle, NTT, EDF, Alstom, ABB, Siemens, Thomson, and the European Union. He has also served as a Foreign Trade Advisor for the French Government.

Yves currently spends about two-thirds of his time in Paris, and one-third in the U.S. He speaks English, French and Romanian. He earned a M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Ecole Centrale Lyon, and a MBA from IAE Paris.

Bunny

K9 Kachingler

Read Bunny's blog

Bunny is a former stray puppy from rural Missouri. He is a one-of-a-kind mutt, and will stay that way since he was neutered at 4 months of age. He has a rodent obsession and particularly loves to read news about squirrels and their ilk. Bunny has been featured in a PayPal ad campaign and ever since then considers himself to be a movie star.

You can reach any of us at firstname dot lastname at kachingle dot com. General contact information in contact section.

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