Contributors

Blair Erickson
Chief Technologist | Sagea Technologies

Blair Erickson is a technologist and creative director whose work spans fields from digital communities, interactive virtual worlds, to virtual reality experiences. He wrote and directed the Netflix released thriller Banshee Chapter, the first feature film in history released in a virtual reality format on Oculus Rift. Recently he created a 50-ft virtual city touch screen experience for Cisco Systems, a #1 charting mobile game CineMagic, and a special virtual reality prototype of the blockchain-based Sagea community presented exclusively at the SIGGRAPH conference in 2016. Blair first got into Bitcoin in 2011 with his friend and Retronyms founder, Dan Walton. 2 years later, the first conversations about how to create a digital society called Sagea began.

As the Creative Director of the Omnicom Group interactive technology agency Millions of Us, Blair built virtual communities and interactive experiences for clients like Google, Facebook, Nike, Warner Bros, DreamWorks, and Sony Playstation. He crafted an alternate reality Webby honored live-action thriller online for Fox‘s “Terminator” series. His campaign won the LACP Spotlight Award for a first-of-its-kind campaign bringing a World Wrestling Entertainment invasion into the digital society of Gaia Online. It’s still written about as a business case study in books like Changing the Game.

Before his stint as creative technologist, Blair worked in entertainment production. He created several early hit viral videos for YouTube in 2007. He also worked writing and producing television episodes for SciFi, Discovery Channel, and E! Entertainment Television.

Blair holds a B.S. in Electronic Media at Carnegie Mellon University, where he did independent research studying Building Virtual Worlds under the late renowned bestselling professor Randy Pausch.

Michael Sessa
CEO | Sagea Technologies

Michael Sessa serves as our CEO and oversees Sagea’s strategic partnership efforts. Sessa has operated several successful startups. He previously worked as a financial advisor for Merrill Lynch.

He currently serves as an advisor to the Central Florida Tech Alliance on Blockchain initiatives and oversees their Mentorship Program, which pairs established executives with new startups in their field to ensure startups are getting the right information and avoiding unnecessary mistakes along the way.    Sessa ran The Orlando Beach Bus in 2010, a transportation & logistics company that provided campus services to University of Central Florida students to get to and from Cocoa Beach safely. The company promoted not drinking and driving through various events on campus and worked with the University’s department of transportation, securing an exclusive contract with Colstar Transportation to receive busses as needed to ensure the most availability to students.

He Holds a Bachelors in Economics from Rollins College and has studied Housing markets, Economic Arbitration, and Chinese Language at the Shanghai University of Finance and Economics in Shanghai, China.

Daniel Walton
Lead Developer | Retronyms

For over a decade Dan has been an owner and co-founder of one of San Francisco’s most innovative and successful app developers, Retronyms. Beyond their smash hit audio recording and music generation apps, he has expanded into new cutting edge realms with Retronyms Labs. Their experience in advanced geolocation helped make Sagea’s early mobile ordering system tests a smash hit with real bar patrons. He first got into Bitcoin in 2011 and helped his friend Blair Erickson protect his investment from the Mt. Gox crash.

Building his software company into innovative new technology, Retronyms Labs created augmented reality and location based apps Dokobots and Seek n Spell. More recently they released cast.market, a tool to connect podcasts and advertisers, now the largest ranking and analytics website for podcasts. Their latest project is the breakthrough fully decentralized blockchain exchange Ethex.Market. Ethex.Market is currently live in beta and gaining new traders and market share daily.

Dan holds a B.S. at Ohio State University in Computer Science and Engineering. He’s spent over a quarter century in signal processing and software development. His experience with C,C++, Python and Javascript have meant he’s always working with the latest cutting edge frameworks and technologies across the stack. He’s continually built and shipped successful apps for the past decade.

Dan Kaltenbaugh
Frontend Developer | Sagea Technologies

Dan is a United States Air Force veteran and software engineering specialist with extensive experience in website design, development and programming. Following his role as USAF Division Chief in Baghdad, Iraq, Dan managed KC-135 Air Operations for United States Pacific Theatre. He currently owns Dijatek, Central Florida’s best software development corporation.

Dan served as Division Chief and Military Senior Site Lead for Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, Baghdad, Iraq. He advised Iraqi Air Force on Air Operations and Air Traffic Control. Trained personnel on Airfield operations and management. Assisted in set-up of first-ever Iraqi Air Force Weather School. He was promoted by Senior Leadership to run the Operations Division of the entire Baghad facility after being on-site for only 2 weeks.

Dan has over 15 years of combined experience in software development, information technology, training and strategic management. Served as lead developer and facilitator for the Air Force Innovation course, ‘What is Innovation?’ USAF software programmer and Aimpoint Construction Systems Analyst for classified, Nuclear Single Integrated Operational Plan targeting database. He also served as a USSTRATCOM programmer utilizing Java, C languages and Visual Basic.

Kia Mia Love
Vice President | Sagea Technologies

Kia serves as a Community Development Manager for Crypto Cooperative, a Central Florida based organization for growing local education on blockchain technology. Her work growing community locally and social outreach has been invaluable in the early stage growth of Orlando’s blockchain community. Kia has been advising the Sagea team on strategic community building for the past 2 years while holding live local events to spread technological education and awareness.

Kia served in Information Technology Support for the United States Army Network Enterprise Technology Command. After her service in the military, Kia worked as a social media activist building online political movements and media organizations on Facebook. She helped grow independent media ventures from a few thousand impressions to millions of viewers weekly during the 2016 election year. She mastered audience growth by leveraging viral sharing on social media and building audiences through streaming content.

John-Paul Walton
Senior Developer | Retronyms

JP Serves as our Senior Developer and has over 20 Years of UX Design and Development for mobile, web and desktop. He has developed design systems and processes for a wide variety of industries including enterprise scale production management, and compliance tools. JP Has helped define some of the leading digital media and audio apps on the app store. Passionate about creating rich digital experiences that enable, empower and delight. He has Blockchain and Dapps and experience with Blockchain related financial products, crypto-trading platforms, and related apps. JP continues to pioneer design patterns for human-user Blockchain interactions, transaction flows and applied experience creating desktop and mobile apps. He has designed and shipped one of the first fully functional web3 decentralized applications.

JP is an experienced analyst of crypto-economic incentives and tokenization and has served as a Blockchain panelist at SF Design Week 2018 w/IDEO, Coinbase, Consensys.

JP holds a B.S. and Master in Arts in Visual Communication Design from Kent State University.

Stephanie Riggs
Creative Director | Sagea Technologies

Stephanie Riggs, former Walt Disney Imagineer, and interdisciplinary content creator focused on directing narrative-driven interactive and immersive social experiences. She began researching and developing human computer interaction in the 1990s, and her projects have been featured at SIGGRAPH and E3. Stephanie serves as creative director for social brand experts Refinery29 where she continues to push the boundaries of social experiences and technology. Stephanie is committed to increasing diversity and access to immersive technology as a mentor for Facebook/Oculus’ “VR For Good” program. She’s co-founder of the AR/VR Academy NYC, and co-leads research at Yale University’s Blended Reality Lab.

Stephanie has worked with Intel, Disney Creative Entertainment, Walt Disney Productions, HBO, and GoogleVR. Grounded in traditional narrative techniques, Stephanie is a New York Times Critic’s Pick director for her documentary The Standbys. She produced Blair Erickson’s award-winning immersive digital 3D feature thriller Banshee Chapter with Zachary Quinto.

In 2015, Stephanie was invited to film Barack Obama’s historic speech in Nairobi, Kenya in 360 and set the world record for the number of people in a simultaneous VR experience with The Nantucket Project. Her VR documentary, “Kanju” had its world premier at the 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

Stephanie holds degrees in Directing (Drama) and Human-Computer Interaction (Computer Science) from Carnegie Mellon University. She was invited to the first class of the Masters of Entertainment Technology program at CMU, is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and an Andrew Carnegie Society Scholar.

Adrian Herbez
Software Developer| Sagea Technologies

Adrian Herbez has served as a software engineer creating digital societies, real time chat applications, and incredible workflow tools for internal project teams. He helped shape and code the initial prototypes for Sagea, even developing the VR prototype interface for the SIGGRAPH presentation. Currently he serves as a Staff Engineer for Lumosity’s innovative educational technology branch Lumos Lab.

As a software engineer for Google, Adrian built real time chat communication tools to run across the web and onto mobile devices. He worked with Linden Labs developing critical software tools for the virtual world community Second Life. He served Sony Playstation’s engineer for developing their virtual community Playstation Home. Also worked as the Lead Gameplay Engineer for web game powerhouse KIXEYE.

He’s spent time training others in his course on C++ Game Programming Instructor for the Academy of Art University.

Adrian holds a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and a Masters in Arts, Computation, and Engineering from the University of Irvine.

Bill Booth
Backend Developer | Sagea Technologies

Bill has served as a backend software engineer creating massive database projects and incredible workflow tools for enormous corporate operations. He worked to craft the initial code and server side development for the Sagea platform, developing the interface for the earliest stage prototype tests. Currently he serves as a Principle Software Engineer for Autodesk.

Previously Bill served as Cloud Systems Engineer for gaming giant ngmoco. He spent four years developing from Lab Engineer to managing Quality Assurance as a Tools Engineer with Riverbed Technologies.

Like Adrian, Stephanie, and Blair, Bill Booth is an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University. The four of them have partnered together on various technology projects for over 20 years.

Zach Saul
Senior Developer | Sagea Technologies

Zach is a Co-founder of Retronyms. Zach specializes in location-based entertainment and complex algorithm audio app development.

Zach focuses on the science of complex networks, including social networks, small-scale features of graphs, graph motifs, node authority, modularity, degree distribution, graph theory, multivariate statistics. His programming skills include cross-platform C++, GUI programming, and lower level systems programming (audio, video, network). He also has extensive experience working with python and perl web programming. His specialties: social entertainment software, including audio, video and web.

Zach holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of California, Davis.

Shaayann Khalid
Strategic Business Development | Sagea Technologies

Shaayann Khalid oversees day-to-day operations, researching new technologies and alternatives methods of efficiency, leverages our team’s strengths to effectively grow the organization, and ensures financial strength and operating efficiency. Shaayann was recently tapped as a consultant for GE Healthcare developing a business plan, marketing and launch strategy, and adaptable blueprint for one of the world’s first-ever symptomatic cancer care clinics in the United States. He was invited this past January by the United Arab Emirate’s Prime Minister’s Office to represent his alma mater in the Global Universities Challenge at the World Government Summit in Dubai, where he helped build global visions for the future.

Shaayann’s constructive and energetic leadership style contributes to a culture of servant-leadership at Sagea, and his commitment to creating meaningful change with the best interests of the people at heart makes him an invaluable member of our team.

Shaayann holds B.A. degrees in both Business Management and Economics from Rollins College in Winter, Park, FL and a Masters of Science degree from Imperial College Business School in London, UK.

Nam Nguyen
Business Development | Sagea Technologies

Nam Nguyen’s experience extends through investor relations for nonprofit organizations (501c3), analytic data research, and organizational business structure. Nam has served as the Assistant State Director of Massachusetts for the Parkinson’s Action Network, before joining the Michael J Fox Foundation as a policy and research advocate. Her extensive experience in working with government relations as a lobbyist has helped pass forward the 21st Century Cures Act and the RAISE Family Caregivers Act.

Nam is currently in leadership for the Rollins College Student Government Association and pursuing a B.A. in Public Policy and Political Economy with specialties in global health and economics. Her research focuses in policy outreach and how data and policy can shape the health of different populations.