Canoe Ventures Expands its Colorado-Based Engineering and Development Team

Canoe Ventures--the company that is implementing Project Canoe, the US cable industry's initiative to create a national unified platform for interactive and addressable advertising (it is backed by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox, Charter, Cablevision and Bright House)--announced Tuesday that it has appointed Tom Huber as executive director of systems integration and testing, and Kevin McHugh as executive director of interactive applications. The two new hires will be part of the company's Engineering and Development team, which is based in its new (opened April 1st) engineering and integration facility in Centennial, Colorado (note: the facility is located in space leased from Comcast Media Center, which is also providing it with lab infrastructure and technical services). They will report to Christy Martin, Canoe's VP of solutions engineering, who is based in New York.

Huber will be tasked with driving end-to-end integration between Canoe Ventures' advanced advertising solutions and the technology infrastructures of its programmer and cable operator partners. He previously worked as a consultant at DigiForge, where he led the development of test tools and the definition of Canoe's integration lab requirements and test plans. Prior to that, Canoe says, he oversaw worldwide deployment of products for OpenTV and led that company's quality assurance program; and, prior to that, he was VP of operations and intellectual assets at Intellocity. He also served as computer technology counsel and information technology leader at Koch Industries, and provided technical support for a multi-million-dollar enterprise development project at McGraw Hill School Systems. He attended the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and holds a BA in international affairs from Florida State University as well as a Masters in international management and a JD from the University of Denver.

McHugh, meanwhile, will be tasked with managing the development of Canoe's interactive TV applications and working with the company's partners to deploy interactive advertising nationally. The company says that he has actually been supporting its work in interactive TV advertising as a consultant since last year. He was previously senior director of product development at Tandberg Television, where his responsibilities included developing new interactive TV and VOD technologies. Prior to joining Tandberg in 2001, he worked as director of information technology at IBM; and, prior to that, served in various technical management positions at AT&T. He holds a BS in computer science from the University of Georgia. "I am excited to have seasoned veterans like Kevin and Tom join our growing engineering team," Canoe's Christy Martin said in a prepared statement. "With teams in New York and Colorado, we now are better positioned to work with industry colleagues across the country as we build solutions that add value to programmers' advertising inventory, and ultimately to marketers and viewers."