Overview
- Current
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- Chief Innovation Officer and Co-founder at Aframe
- Past
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- Co-founder at Help Me Investigate
- Fellow at Clore Leadership Programme
- Digital Culture Associate at Made Media
- Co-founder at Type Records
- The Daddy at Odadeo
- Trustee at St. George's School, Edgbaston
- Co-Founder at Creative Republic
- Director at Fierce! Festival Ltd.
- Managing Director at 3form
- Director at Plus Expo Ltd.
- Creative Director at WebXpress
- Freelance Designer (Self-employed)
- Education
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- Clore Leadership Programme
- Enterprise City High Growth Programme
- The University of Birmingham
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The University of Birmingham
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Oaklands College, St. Albans
- Recommendations
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17 people have recommended Stef
- Connections
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500+ connections
- Websites
Summary
Award-winning digitally creative entrepreneur.
Currently building the collaborative video platform Aframe - it helps TV- and Film-makers work together via the web, and solves a lot of the irritating problems you get when working with huge files on a deadline. With Aframe you can store media (we're our own provider), search it and share it straight off the back of the camera.
One killer feature - we're making video timelines text-searchable. Drop several hours of video on a tape to our London ingest room, we add metadata in faster-than-realtime about what's happening on-screen at a particular moment ("pan", "zoom", "fight", "Robert De Niro", "street", "running", "New York", "cab", "machine gun"...).
Then in your edit, on the web, and via an API you can search your media for keywords to make your programme, construct automatically-generated programmes, or just pull out the clip for the moment you want in your archive.
I'm in charge of rapidly building an agile team of talented people to do this, the most ambitious project I've yet undertaken.
Day-to-day I'm one of the main contributors to the codebase, but I actually have a remit for 'ooh shiny', so you'll find me rapid-prototyping ideas, failing fast on what doesn't work and when we find something that does, putting the weight of the development team behind it by helping design it for production.
It's all set to be a very exciting year!
Specialties
Web, internet, innovation, leadership, public speaking, agile, culture, creative, Ruby, TDD, video, film, javascript, mobile
Experience
Chief Innovation Officer and Co-founder
Aframe
Public Company; 11-50 employees; Broadcast Media industry
April 2009 – Present (2 years 11 months) London, United Kingdom
Aframe is a new collaborative video platform for professional TV, video and film-makers that takes away a lot of the pain of working digitally.
I co-founded the company and we've now grown from 2 to 36 people and raised £2.5m of finance.
I lead an agile team of talented developers to build a set of products and services, including our own web-based asset management platform, distributed transcode and ingest system, team collaboration tools, rapid metadata annotation apps, desktop application, Avid and Final Cut integration, and lots more.
Day-to-day it's a mixture of technical architecture, research, experimenting with what's next and new, working out what to do (and what not to do), design work (I did the initial branding), and a lot of code - Ruby, Javascript, HTML5, C++, API-wrangling and everything else inbetween.
Co-founder
Help Me Investigate
Privately Held; 1-10 employees; Online Media industry
January 2009 – December 2010 (2 years) Birmingham, United Kingdom
One of the first investments for Channel 4's innovation fund 4IP, Help Me Investigate is a website for people to ask difficult questions that they can't get answered elsewhere and collaborate with other people in their local community to answer them. Eg. "Why was the tree outside my house cut down?" or "What was the £400,000 of regeneration funding for my area actually spent on?"
The Daddy
Odadeo
March 2008 – May 2010 (2 years 3 months) Birmingham, United Kingdom
An attempt to build a social networking and digital toolbox for dads. Built a wonderful little site for involved dads, only to find that what most dads really wanted was a shop and a forum about what to buy for their kids in the shop.
Trustee
St. George's School, Edgbaston
Educational Institution; 201-500 employees; Primary/Secondary Education industry
December 2006 – November 2009 (3 years) Birmingham, United Kingdom
School governor of St. George's School - Birmingham’s first fully co-educational independent day school for ages 2½ to 18 years.
Managing Director
3form
Privately Held; 201-500 employees; Plastics industry
May 2001 – March 2009 (7 years 11 months) Birmingham, United Kingdom
Award-winning digital creative agency.
Skills
Education
Clore Leadership Programme
Fellow, Cultural and Creative Leadership
2008 – 2010
Enterprise City High Growth Programme
2008 – 2009
The University of Birmingham
Alumnus of the Year
2006 – 2006
The University of Birmingham
BSc, Computer Science / Software Engineering
1996 – 1999
My main interest was in artificial intelligence, so I chose AI options where possible.
Activities and Societies: BubbleUp!, Robots in Disguise
Oaklands College, St. Albans
International Baccalaureate, -
1994 – 1996
Additional Information
- Interests:
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Photography (one day I'll do an exhibition), music (mainly listening, but I DJ occasionally), new technology, hill walking, snowboarding, art, film.
- Groups and Associations:
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Birmingham University School of Computer Science Natural Computation Industrial Advisory Board, Birmingham University 1900 Society, British Humanist Association, PAST: Digital Central Interactive Steering Group, Digital Central Steering Group, Department for Culture Media and Sport Creative Economy Programme Working Group - Access to Finance for the Creative Industries 2006, Advisor on NESTA Creative Pioneers Programme 2006, Mentor on the Boost Scheme with Hi8us
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- Honors and Awards:
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White Bull Award 2011
Smarta100 for Aframe 2011
Finalist: Guardian Disruptive Technology MEGA 2011
Top 5: Courvoisier The Future 500 2009
Webby Award (plus double Honoree) 2008
Joint Guardian Innovation Award: Best Independent Blog 2008
Finalist RTS Innovation Award - User Generated Content 2007
British Council Digital Pioneer 2007
Alumnus of the Year, Birmingham University 2006-07
Birmingham Small Business of the Year 2005-06
Birmingham Young Professional of the Year 2005-06
Channel 4 Creative Class 2005-6
Champion of Industry, Mustard 2005 (top 1% high growth companies in West Midlands, UK)
O2 / Arena magazine - Shortlisted for Entrepreneur of the Year in Birmingham
Mustard Award: Best Start-Up Birmingham 2004
Birmingham Creative City Award: Outstanding Innovation 2004
Work featured in Browser 3.0 - Creative Review's Top 50 websites of the year 2002
Gold Award: Best Non-Profit Organisation Website - World Media Festival Hamburg 2001
NASTA winner of Best Title Sequence
