Management Team
Rob Balgley – CEO
Balgley has worked as CEO of several category-defining companies funded by some of the most successful venture capital firms in the world. Most recently, he was CEO of SkyeTek, the worldwide market share leader in embedded RFID readers and technology. Prior to that, Balgley was CEO of Jabber, the pioneer and leader in enterprise instant messaging, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems. Before Jabber, he was CEO of Mobile Logic, an early market leader of mobile data networking software. Earlier in this career, Balgley held executive positions in sales and marketing at GE, 3Com, Hughes Aircraft, and Case Communications.
Christopher Jaynes, Ph.D. – CTO
In 2004, Jaynes co-founded Mersive and now serves as the company Chief Technical Officer. He received his doctoral degree at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst where he worked on camera calibration and aerial image interpretation technologies now in use by the federal government. Jaynes received his BS degree with honors from the School of Computer Science at the University of Utah. Prior to his work at Mersive, Jaynes founded the Metaverse Lab dedicated to addressing problems in multimedia technologies and research related to video surveillance, human-computer interaction, and display technologies. It was recognized as one of the leading laboratories for computer vision and interactive media and has contributed to self-calibrating displays, video tracking and surveillance, illumination models, and projective geometry. In 2000, he helped found the University of Kentucky Center for Visualization and Virtual Environments where he studied problems related to virtual reality and novel display systems.
Stephen Webb – Chief Scientist
Webb is Co-Founder of Mersive and is currently responsible for product design and development. He completed his Bachelor of Science degree as well as graduate coursework in Computer Science at the University of Kentucky. As an undergraduate he worked closely with his advisor, Christopher Jaynes, conducting research in multi-projector systems. As a graduate student he continued his work in large-scale displays, focusing on camera-based calibration methods. In his master’s degree research he developed a method for calibrating multiple projectors on curved display surfaces.
Cathie Brunnick – VP, Sales & Business Development
With more than 20 years of information technology experience, Brunnick brings a focus on sales execution, channel sales, and market development to the Mersive executive team. Prior to Mersive, Brunnick was a founder and the COO of Patheos.com. She also held position of Vice President of Global Channels and Alliances at Vignette Corporation. There she was responsible for developing and executing the alliance and channel sales models to deliver long-term success to this leading web company. She also held the role of Vice President of Sales and Alliances at TeleTech, where she was responsible for the sales and alliance strategies. Brunnick has also held senior-level positions at USA.NET, Pivotal Corporation and J.D. Edwards and Company. She holds a master’s degree from the University of Colorado and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of the Pacific.
Christine Owens – Director, Marketing
Owens has been providing strategy insights and communications expertise to CXO-level executives for more than 20 years. Prior to joining Mersive, Owens headed Amplify Communications LLC, a communications consulting firm working with small and mid-size technology companies to build strong relationships with their customers, partners, employees and market influencers. Owens founded Amplify after ten years with multi-billion dollar companies, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems. Over the course of her career, Owens’ experience has spanned marketing, public relations, coalition and alliance formation, Web site management, employee communications, government relations, community relations, technical project management and non-profit management. Owens earned both her graduate and undergraduate degrees from The George Washington University.
Scott Ruff – Director, Engineering
Ruff has twenty years experience in software development and engineering leadership, with a focus on graphics, video, and multimedia applications. Previous employers include NVIDIA, Hewlett Packard, EDS, and a number of technology startups. Ruff has extensive experience building complex, cross-platform, end user software products. Ruff received his BS in Computer Science from California State University Long Beach in 1991.