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Profile

Portrait Sebastian A. Weiß

Sebastian A. Weiß – Dipl. Media System Designer (FH)
 

Nationality: German
Date of Birth: 29.05.1978
Place of Birth: Darmstadt, Germany
Language Skills: German (native), English (fluently)

Recent

04/22 – today Co-Founder and CPO „One Place. Them All. (1PTA GmbH)“
 

SaaS start-up with the aim of simplifying the orchestration of generative AI workflows

Selected Activities

PRODUCT OWNER: Responsible for product development, both strategically and conceptually.

BUSINESS PLAN DEVELOPMENT: Development of the company pitch deck, preparation of investment memos, development of the investment roadmap

INVESTOR RELATIONS: Continuous approach and communication with potential investors from the venture capital and private equity sectors

CO-INITIATOR OF VOCCA: vocca is an app and platform built by AMS Bielefeld, WDR mediagroup and 1PTA GmbH for the distribution of local journalistic content.

Past

09/16 – 03/22 Managing Director and CTO at „nacamar GmbH“
 

Leading role in the restructuring of the company with a strong focus on audio products. Transforming nacamar to a highly profitable business.

Selected Activities

ADDRADIO CDN PLATFORM: Responsible for the system architecture, set-up and operations of the renewed audio CDN infrastructure used among others by ARD (public German broadcasters radio stations) and most of Germany’s private radio stations.

INVENTOR AND LEADING DEVELOPER OF YBRID: nacamar’s audio innovation provides interactive and personalized live streams for the masses. Pioneer of interactive audio in Germany. Together with 104.6 RTL and SWR, he won several awards.

ESTABLISHMENT OF PRODUCT MANAGEMENT: Introduction and establishment of Product Management at nacamar. Restructuring of existing products as well as conception and definition of new product ideas. Building up of the PM team.

08/13 – 06/16 Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at „nacamar GmbH“
 

Responsible for the area of research & development, disciplinary and technical responsibility for platform development & operations and customer services.

Selected Activities

HBBTV LIVESTREAMING: Development and expansion of nacamar's own delivery technologies for HbbTV: project management and main developer of the self-developed delivery system of nacamar, development of delivery technologies according to HbbTV standards 1.1 and 1.5.

OTT SERVICES: Architecture, conception and implementation of nacamar's own OTT Services Platform “onteve”. Services include: Automated recording for NPVR and catchup, post-processing, e.g., automated post-transcoding into various formats for different end devices and the generation of chapter images, Broadcast-ready workflow integration

CODECS: In-house development of an MPEG-TS transmuxer according to ISO/IEC 13818-1, ISO/IEC 13818-2 and ISO/IEC 13818-3. Area of application is the in-house OTT service platform, especially in the area of recording and signal distribution.

06/09 – 07/13 Director Technical Services at „nacamar GmbH“
 

Selected Projects

ZDF-mediathek – project manager operating the channel`s on demand service. Concept and setup of the platforms for different kinds of delivery, account managing and reporting of the monthly KPIs, responsible for an expansion meeting the demand to ensure the operation.

Setup of a high performance data aggregation platform, including accounting and datawarehouse: project manager, conception and setup of platforms processing log data and server data in real time (Big Data), focus on scaling and stability, use of Hadoop as processing cluster, processing of up to 40 mio datasets a day.

Setup of the new clients´portal: project manager, conception and development, coordination wiht external service providers, technology: Java Enterprise Server Liferay, Glassfish application server, Portlet development on the basis of Java Server Faces.

Development and extension of nacamar´s own delivery technologies used for HbbTV: project manager and main developer of this technology, development of delivery technologies according to the HbbTV standards 1.1 and 1.5.

Miscellaneous

Disciplinary responsibility for up to 10 employees

Head of Technical Operations, Technical Services and Research & Development

Responsible for a cost center budget of approx. 1 MEUR

3/04 – 12/13 Research Project „Scenejo“
 

New solutions in the field of digital storytelling, using artificial natural speach agents and enabling the user to influence the course of dialog.

Surveys in communication between human being and machine as well as e-learning.

Joint project with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Wolfgang Müller (University of Education, Weingarten) and Prof. Dr. Ulrike Spierling (University of Applied Sciences Rhein-Main).

09/05 – 03/10 Managing Director and Head of Development at „weiß&schmidt“
 

Selected Projects

Implementation of "Liquid Scatter Space`s" first version for Liquiverse GmbH until 2008, including the development of new and visionary UI-components. These resulted in a fundamentally new access to huge amounts of data for data mining, made possible through innovative user interfaces. For more information visit Liquiverse.
Technology used: Java, especially Java Swing

The project “Sound of the Squares” (comissioned by the city marketing of Mannheim) was realised in the course of the celebrations of Mannheim´s 400th anniversary in 2008. weiß&schmidt´s conception and realisation of the software sequencer was awarded the Yellow Pencil Award 2008 by the British artdirectors´ association D&AD in the section environmental design.
Technology used: MaxMSP and Java

Digital Video und Audio Signal Matrix for Tiscali Business GmbH. This platform was half-automated and gave control over live signal aquisition and playout of digital video signals. Therefore, it was possible to receive diverse satellite feeds as well as to redirect those signals to different delivered video streams. The switching could be done manually or automated on the basis of previously scheduled events.
Technology used: Java, Java Server Faces, weiß&schmidt's libraries for av-component control for Crest, Extron etc.

Audio and Video Stream Monitoring Platform for the measurement of Quality of Service respectively Quality of Experience for the streaming service provider Tiscali Business GmbH.
Technology used: Java, C#, Windows Media Framework, Actionscript 3.0; based on monitoring solution Nagios.

Miscellaneous

Disciplinary responsibility for up to 3 employees

Object oriented software development in the area of data visualization

Modelling of business processes

Generative software development and Model Driven Architecture

06/06 – 05/09 Assistant Research Fellow and Lecturer at University of Education Weingarten
 

Member of group "Media Education and Visualization (MeVis)"

Lectures concerning the following topics:

  • Media Creation and Conception
  • Java Programming
  • Programming Squeak - a Programming Language Appropriate for Children
  • Application of Podcasting for Classes

Research concerning the use of personal computers in classes as well Digital Storytelling

07/05 – 04/06 Member of German-Polish Artist's Radio "Radio_Copernicus",
University of Arts Berlin
thereof 12/05 – 04/06 Technichal Director
 

Live broadcasts via audio streaming and on air (UKW) from Stralsund (07/22 - 08/13/2005), Warszawa (09/01 - 09/31/2005), Berlin (11/01 - 11/23/2005) and Wrocław (12/01 - 12/31/2005)

Production and technical assistence of radio features

Setup, monitoring and maintanance of broadcasting equipment

Head of archiving the broadcasted audio material. Setup of a "Hörstation" at the "Center of Art and Media's" (ZKM) media library in Karlsruhe, Germany.

4/04 – 5/04 Software Consultant for Concept Creation and Implementation of a "Music On Demand" Testing Environment
for Tiscali Deutschland Business Division
 

Integration with web service interfaces of MOD Provider OD2

Development of a prototype eShop for payed-content.

4/02 – 3/04 Software Developer for Distributed Knowledge Management System "Dinow"
at ekkono GmbH Darmstadt
 

Development of the grafical user interface using Java Swing components

Refactoring of the existing source code

Development of a new communication system based on peer-to-peer concepts

Object oriented software design with focus on reusability and stability, including usage of design patterns

Usage of development tools "Ant", "JUnit", "Eclipse", "Sun One Studio" etc.

Application of "Extreme Programming" as software development process

Technology used: Java, Java Swing, JXTA, Lucene etc.

1/01 – 06/01 Concept and Realization of an Interactive Multimedia Presentation for Swiss Artist
Prof. Res Ingold (Munich)
 

Commissioned by media transfer GmbH Darmstadt, Germany

Concept creation and realization of an interactive multimedia appliacation used for an installation by "ingold airlines" at Frankfurt Airport during the "art Frankfurt" fair 2001.

Technology used: Macromedia Director, C++

Awards

2020 App of the Year, Google Play Awards 2020
Category “Best Daily Helper”
SWR won this award for its SWR3 App, that has been based on nacamar’s product innovation Ybrid
2018 German Radio Award 2018 - Category Innovation
Together with 104.6 RTL Berlin for the “Swop”: Swapping music titles during a synchronous live broadcast individually per listener
2012 eco Internet Awards 2012 - Category IPTV
eco Verband der deutschen Internetwirtschaft e.V.
2008 Yellow Pencil Award
Yellow Pencil Award, D&AD Awards, 2008

Engineering Skills (Excerpt)

>30 years Programming
>20 years Java, PHP, C, C++, (C#), (Turbo-)Pascal, etc.
>20 years Object oriented design; design patterns
>20 years Distributed systems; Peer-to-Peer
>20 years Agile Development, Extreme Programming Scrum, TDD
>15 years Intelligent Agents, Natural Language Processing
>15 years Audio- and video digital broadcasting technologies incl. codecs
>10 years Cloud Environments

Working Knowledge & Strengths

Interdisciplinary and open-minded innovator in the field of media technologies
Tremendous experience in building and operating high-performance platforms, on physical as well as on virtual infrastructure
Long-time management and leadership experience for digital business-models
Extremely strong in product conception under consideration of customer requirements, technological and also financial framework conditions
 
 
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