Management Team

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Diane Sammer

CEO
Diane Sammer, CEO, is responsible for the overall direction of FlyFi and Emergent Discovery. Ask Diane what guides her and she quickly responds: "People are the path to music and the best way to find new music is through others who share a similar passion."

Prior to forming Emergent Discovery LLC, Diane helped found Systems/Link Corporation and served as its President and CEO for five years. Systems/Link, a software and network supplier to global wireless companies, was named by Inc. magazine to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in the U.S. and Diane was featured in Wireless Week magazine as one of 24 "Enterprising Women of Wireless."

Prior to founding Systems/Link, Diane worked in sales and marketing at Computer Sciences Corporation. She earned her B.A. in psychology with a Minor in Computer Science from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (formerly North Adams State College.) She was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by MCLA.

Diane serves on the advisory board of the Maine Small Business Development Center and she's a judge for the University of Southern Maine's Business Plan Competition.

Barry Kurland

President and COO
Barry is responsible for FlyFi and Emergent Discovery's product development, operations, strategic partnerships, marketing and sales. Prior to joining Emergent Discovery, Barry worked as an Operating Partner at a venture capital firm–responsible for strategy consulting with portfolio companies, deal sourcing, due diligence, investment decisions, fundraising and more. Barry also spent a decade at Microsoft Corporation–where he launched, grew and managed five new ventures in emerging markets. Barry played a central role in developing and launching Microsoft's MSN Sidewalk, Microsoft's Worldwide Business Desk, and Small and Mid-Market Solutions and Partner Group business in New England, and led the Microsoft Technology Center organization. Barry also helps national, regional and local community and social service organizations, including the work he did to help develop and launch Habitat for Humanity's Cars for Homes program. He currently serves on the Technology Advisory Board of Cambridge College in Boston. Barry earned his MBA, and Bachelor of Science of Business Administration degree summa cum laude from the University of Vermont.

Gary Robinson

CTO
Gary Robinson, CTO, is both a musician and leader in the "recommendation engine" field. Gary’s background reflects his pioneering work in mathematics, technology and collaborative filtering. For instance, as a Research Director at ActiveState, Gary’s work on spam detection is now being widely adopted by the anti-spam industry, including such leading filters as SpamAssassin (PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for spam filtering), SpamSieve (MacWorld's Software of the Year) and SpamBayes (PC World's Editor's Choice for spam filtering). Related to this work, Gary won a National Science Foundation/SBIR award–researching and developing collaborative filtering techniques that serve as the foundation for much of FlyFi’s technology platform. In the mid-1980's Gary founded Microvox Systems, Inc., a voice mail-based dating service in New York City called 212-ROMANCE. This venture is widely accepted as the earliest commercial voice mail service to create community-based automated recommendations. Gary’s breakthrough was to create and implement an idea now referred to as collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering enjoys widespread use today for such applications as recommending movies, music, and even Web sites. 212-ROMANCE was the first commercial application to use collaborative filtering. An accomplished acoustic guitar player, Gary wrote and performed a song on an album carried by Smithsonian Folkways. After getting his BA in Mathematics from Bard College, Gary did graduate study work in Mathematics at the Courrant Institute at NYU before becoming a full-time entrepreneur and groundbreaking technology guru. Check out Gary's blog at www.garyrobinson.net.

Michael Stefanakos

Vice President of Marketing and Sales
Michael has spent more than 15 years selling and marketing great high-tech products and ideas. Before joining Emergent Discovery, Michael founded Blackfin Group, a boutique recruiting firm specializing in software executives. Before that, he sold national accounts for Blue Martini, an e-commerce and CRM suite that served up recommendations and relevant content to national retailers. Michael learned about building custom, complex, end-to-end e-businesses from his work with NexGenix, a global consultancy serving huge consumer-driven clients. As part of Computer Associates’ strategic account group in New York, Michael led the company’s efforts to close deals with some of the world’s leading banks and financial giants. It all began with hardware in Idaho, when he helped found the corporate sales team of Micron Electronics in the early days of the direct PC revolution. Michael earned a BA in English and History from Marietta College. When he’s not streaming FlyFi.com, he skis the trees in the western mountains of Maine with his two young sons and drinks several good shots of espresso a day.

Bob Swerdlow

Chief Engineer
Bob Swerdlow excels at working with high-energy people and creating new applications that create value for users. Bob has a B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard and over twenty-five years experience managing, developing, and delivering awarding-winning products in a wide range of fields. These include a long history with Macintosh software, having won MacWorld Eddy awards for inbox and PhotoMac. Also, Bob's award-winning language software was featured at Apple's PowerPC introduction. Bob has worked on software for natural language translation and one of the first all digital videotape editing systems in various capacitiesófrom a software engineer at Think Technologies to a VP of Software at the Avalon Dev Group. Most recently, Bob had his own consulting firm, which boasts the Greater Portland Chamber of Commerce, Polaroid and the Portland Musuem of Art as clients.

Eric Eaton

Creative Director
Eric Eaton is steeped in cutting edge Web development. From 1996 - 2001 Eric was a chief developer and designer at Hotwired and Wired Digital, helping to create such pioneering sites as Webmonkey, Wired News and Hotbot. in 2002 he authored Design Whys: Designing Website Interface Elements (Peachpit Press). As principal of Deliberate, Eric has helped an array of organizations with identity design, way-finding systems, exhibits and typographic systems. Other hats Eric has worn are: adjunct professor at Maine College of Art, type designer and exhibit curator, musician and designer/builder of traditional, Greenland-style kayaks.

Randy Labbe

Music Industry Advisor
Randy Labbe, a founder of Emergent Discovery, has been in the music business all of his adult life. And he’s still around to tell about it. Randy has produced both live and recorded music, including over 80 international releases that have garnered 10 Grammy Nominations. He has worked with such blues luminaries as Tab Benoit, Rory Block, James Cotton, Maria Muldaur, Charlie Musselwhite, and Jimmy Thackery. He has also worked with artists on side-projects and compilations including Greg Brown, Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, Lucinda Williams and Graham Parker. Throughout his career, Randy has worked in booking and management for blues and roots music performers. Randy is passionate about music and about getting great music in front of an audience. He is a co-founder of several blues and roots music festivals, most recently the Saltwater Music Festival and the Knock on Wood Guitarfest, both in Maine. Randy is a graduate of Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Mike Werner

Marketing/Business Development Advisor
Before joining FlyFi and bringing his considerable experience to the table, Mike was an Exec-in-Residence at Flagship Ventures in Cambridge, MA–focused on the changing dynamics and shifting platforms within the software & Internet market. Mike was engaged with and learned from premier players such as Adobe, IBM, Facebook. Google and MySpace. Prior to this appointment, Mike spent 16 years at Microsoft Corporation in a variety of strategic platform, marketing and business development roles in Redmond, Silicon Valley, and Boston. Mike ran Microsoft’s Venture Capital and Emerging Business Team–responsible for investment, M&A, IP and product team integration with venture-backed businesses. Throughout his tenure in Redmond, Mike led some of Microsoft’s most valuable partnering, business development and ecosystem initiatives with an emphasis on platform and developer oriented technologies. Mike’s career at Microsoft started in Corporate Public Relations where he focused on Microsoft’s language and tools business, as well as served as Executive Relations Specialist, managing content, media and presentations support for Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates Mike earned a B.A. from the University of Maine in Orono.