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Thumtronics Staff
James Plamondon, Chief Executive Officer, was with Microsoft Corporation for eight years (1992-2000), first in Silicon Valley and then in Redmond, Washington State, USA. At Microsoft, Jim was responsible for accelerating the marketplace’s adoption of Microsoft’s proprietary technologies in order to establish them as de facto industry standards. Considered to be among Microsoft’s top 10 public speakers, Jim designed and executed some of Microsoft’s most successful adoption-acceleration campaigns, training other Microsoft employees in mandatory seminars covering his techniques. The success of his campaigns’ efforts has been written up in the Washington Post and Red Herring Magazine. Jim’s later responsibilities at Microsoft included the organization and funding of university research projects, including the funding of research at MIT, INRIA, Utrecht, ETH Zurich, University of Queensland, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne. He managed an independent marketing project with a budget of over US$2 million ("Project 7," successfully accelerating global academic acceptance of Microsoft’s .NET Runtime). After leaving Microsoft, Jim spent more than two years studying the theory underlying the successful marketing of new technology products (e.g., small-world networks, path dependence & customer lock-in, complexity theory, the psychology of persuasion, etc.) and started writing a book on the subject, which was postponed indefinitely upon invention of the Thummer. Previous to Microsoft, Jim was a leading member of Silicon Valley’s software development community, as President of the Bay Area MacApp Developer’s Association (BAMADA) and author of dozens of articles on programming for Windows and the Macintosh computer. He was involved in the development of software products such as Abacus Concepts’ SuperANOVA and PowerUP!’s Calendar Creator. At Thumtronics, Jim is lead inventor, lead investor, lead manager, and – on the side – co-author of academic papers describing Thumtronics' breakthroughs in music theory. Jim' combination of strategic, marketing, and technical abilities is the ideal core around which to build a management team in Austin to bring the Thummer to market. To quote Dana Massey, 25 year veteran of the music technology industry (including stints at Apple Computer, E-mu Systems, Creative Technologies, Waves, NeXT, Audience, and FluxNetwork, in positions ranging from Software Engineer to Director), “Jim has the personality to win. He has the attention to detail, the intelligence, the business acumen, the manufacturing insight, and the passion to persist against all obstacles. He also finds and collaborates with brilliant people – witness his co-author credits on his white papers [i.e., University of Wisconsin’s Prof. William Sethares and The Tonal Centre’s Andrew Milne]. This is a quality that I saw in Steve Jobs." Jim writes the ThumMeister Blog. |
