Rachad ALAO – Chief Technology Officer

Phone: (514) 934-5543 ∙ Email: rachad_alao@yahoo.com

SUMMARY OF QUALIFICATIONS:

·         High-tech executive with a strong background in embedded Consumer Electronic device technologies

·         Outstanding knowledge of Digital TV Set Top Box (STB), Mobile phone and Networking technologies.

·         Excellent knowledge of embedded Flash® and HTML5 engines.

·         10+ years of international technical leadership experience (US Silicon Valley, Canada and France).

·         Inventor of several patents (encryption, communication protocol, communication gateway, etc.)

RELEVANT EXPERIENCE:

Bluestreak Technology is a leading Flash® and HTML5 based UI Engine and Application Frameworks vendor for embedded Consumer Electronics devices (Set Top Boxes, Mobile Phones, Digital TVs, Tablets, etc.).

Responsibilities include:

• Defining technical strategy, product architecture and product roadmaps
• Leading technical discussions with Bluestreak’s large STBs, Digital TVs and Mobile Phones  customers worldwide (Panasonic IC, Qualcomm, France Telecom R&D, Bouygues, DivX, Thomson, etc.)
• Contributing to critical technical developments
• Supporting Business Development Initiatives
• Attending industry trade shows (IBC Amsterdam, MWC Barcelona, etc.)

Achievements include:

• Helping close several multi-million dollars contracts
• Defining Bluestreak’s HTML5 technical strategy and product roadmap
• Architecting Bluestreak’s Hybrid Flash / HTML5 solution

Positions included VP Engineering (Americas), VP Technology, Deputy CTO, Chief Architect and Technical Manager

Responsibilities included:

• Building and managing a 25 people engineering organization, providing technical leadership, managing resources, tracking project executions and solving outstanding problems.
• Defining product architecture and technical strategy.
• Leading technical discussions with large European Digital TV STB customers (NDS, Thomson)
• Contributing to key development projects

Achievements included:

• Helping close several multi-million dollars contracts
• Participating in the development of Bluestreak’s BREW® based Broadcast TV solution for Qualcomm’s FLO TV
• Architecting, managing and leading the development Bluestreak’s Hardware Porting Kit and MachBlue TV solutions. These solutions account for a large portion of Bluestreak’s revenues today.
• Significantly contributing to the design and deployment of MachBlue TV and MachBlue Mobile at several operators including Orange (France), TvCabo (Portugal) and Telecom Italia Alice (France).

 TiVo is a world leading company in Personal Video Recorder systems.

Voodoo Technologies is a software development and consulting firm I founded.

Achievements included:

• Managing the integration of Broadcom’s Linux MPEG Audio/Video drivers for TiVo’s Series2 (Generation 04) Set Top Boxes. Ported TiVo Hardware Porting Kit to new platforms and developed several miscellaneous Linux drivers to/for the above mentioned platform.
• Designing a multiple satellite, multiple Set Top Boxes, shared medium, DiSEqC based control protocol for a major US satellite service provider.
• Participating in the architecture and development of TiVoToGo, TiVo’s Home Media Option package.

OpenTV is a world leading company in Digital Interactive TV software.

Achievements included:

• Inventing many OpenTV US and European patents covering novel aspects of OpenTV’s back-end infrastructure.
• Leading the architecture design and the development of OpenTV return channel communication platform including OpenTV Gateway server and the DigitalTV Application Transfer Protocol stack.
• Leading the development of OpenTV Html to O-code (H2O) transcoder. The H2O transcoder is a server side browser that converts dynamically Web based assets (HTML, JavaScript, jpegs, gifs, etc.) into OpenTV specific assets suitable for low-end Set Top Boxes (less than 40 MIPS and 4MB of Ram).
• Leading the architecture design of Echostar’s Digital Video Recorder (DVR) capable Electronic Program Guide embedded applications.
• Leading the architecture design and the development of Echostar’s OpenTV powered Interactive Program Guide embedded applications. This project was critical for OpenTV’s IPO on the Nasdaq stock exchange.

Achievements included:

• Developing OpenTV O-code common libraries as well as a reusable Unix based large O-code application framework. Provided technical assistance to Telefonica I+D (Madrid, Spain) for the launch of Via Digital OpenTV EN1 STB.

Achievements included:

• Developing a Data compression FPGA chip using LZSS parallel architecture.
• Developing Data compression software for PC in C language.
• Developing a Window Manager Library for Borland C programming
• Contributing to the design and development of OpenTV's first Internet Solution (OpenTV Web).
• Designing a Reservation Algorithm for WDM (Wavelength Division Multiple Access) Optical Fiber networks.
• Building a specification draft for a hardware implementation of an IEEE 1394 high-speed serial bus.
• Developing a digital communication simulator to analyze the behavior of coded modulations on a Rayleigh channel.

EDUCATION:

Master in Telecommunication Engineering

National Preparatory Class Program emphasizing Mathematics and Physics. This is an elite undergraduate program leading to competitive examinations for admission to French graduate-level engineering institutes ("Grandes Ecoles", i.e. “French Ivy League” schools).

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• Computer languages: C, C++, C#, Intel x86 assembly, ARM assembly, ActionScript 2, EcmaScript, Ada, Pascal
• Computer and TV API's: POSIX, Java Native Interfaces, OpenTV, Win32, Linux kernel API, Microsoft MFC, Windows.net, BREW.
• Computer and embedded OS: Linux (ST-Linux, Broadcom Linux, Red-Hat, Ubuntu), Android NDK, Unix (Solaris), Windows (7/XP/2000/NT, 98, 95), MS-DOS, ST OS 20/21.
• Communication Protocols: Internet related protocols (PPP, IP, UDP, TCP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.), WDM protocols, HFC, IEEE1394, ADSL.
• Data/Audio/Video/Image Compression: Lempel-Ziv, Huffman, MPEG4-AVC, 3GPP, MPEG2 Audio and Video, JPEG.
• Encryption: RSA, Diffie-Helman, Blowfish, RC4, DES.
• Graphics: OpenVG, DirectFB
• Digital TV Signal: MPEG 2 transport, DVB SI, DVB C/S/T/H.
• Electronic CAD software: Altera Platforms, HSpice, VHDL and AHDL Languages
• Internet: Linux Server administration (including IPChains based Firewall, HTTP Apache, SMTP Sendmail, DNS, SSH servers administration).
• Build environments, version control tools and debugger: gmake, gcc, gdb, ddd, sccs, cvs, ClearCase, Perforce, Sun Workshop, Visual Studio.net, Visual C++, Borland C++, st20cc.

PATENTS:

LANGUAGES:

• English: Fluent
• French: Mother tongue
• Spanish: Basic knowledge