Michael Leventhal
Market and Product Strategy for New Technologies
mobile: 408-386-2608 website: http://www.textscience.com
email: Contact me through LinkedIn

In a Nutshell

Proven track record developing and launching software and hardware innovations – including many first to market successes: Web and XML software infrastructure and tools, early collaborative web applications, hardware accelerators, low-cost MRI, an unconventional computer processor.

10 years software development and engineering experience, combined with 10 years of product management and technical marketing, within start-ups and established companies, both in ‘the valley’ and internationally (France, Finland, UK). U.C. Berkeley Engineering (EECS) degree.

Jobs

Technical Marketing Manager

Micron

2010 - Present

Boise, Idaho

25,000 employees

Unconventional processor architecture, research potential applications and develop virgin markets, highly technical product management of both hardware and software, invented and led development of a hardware description language, led development of application prototypes and benchmarks, developed and managed relations with research institutions, and supervised PhD student interns.

Senior Product Line Manager

LSI Corporation

2007-2010

San Diego

5000 employees

Enterprise software (e.g., SAP) acceleration with high performance chip-level hardware and software. Responsible for both software and hardware product management and both inbound and outbound marketing. Entire division was moved offshore.

Senior Director

Tarari

2003-2007

San Diego

Start-up

Web Services API high performance chip-level hardware and software. First XML hardware accelerator. Acquired by LSI for $85M.

Engineering Manager

Commerce One

2000-2003

Boston/Silicon Valley

4000 employees

Web Services platform, first B2B hub.

Director Software Development

DMSi

1999

Boston

Start-up

Document management tools.

Technical Lead

CITEC

1998

Finland

Start-up

Mozilla-based web browser.

Director Consulting

Zuno

1997

London

Start-up

Document management tools. Acquired by Pearson.

VP Technology

GRiF

1996

Paris

Start-up

Web editing tools, first WYSIWYG XML and HTML editors. Acquired by i4i, technology central to $300M lawsuit won by acquirer against Microsoft.

Instructor

UC Berkeley Extension

1996-1997

San Francisco Bay Area

University

Taught (possibly the world's first) course on XML in the EECS department.

Founder/Consultant/Developer

Text Science

1994-1996

San Francisco

Start-up

My own start-up/consulting house. Pioneer in XML tools and XML-based applications and web sites, internationally recognized authority.

Developer/Architect

Oracle

1992-1994

Silicon Valley

108,000 employees

Database tools, pre-web browser.

Software/Firmware Engineer

UCSF Radiologic Imaging Laboratory

1990-1992

San Francisco

R&D environment

First commercial permanent magnet MRI medical device. Coding from bare metal to UI levels.

Experience in Detail, Last 10 Years

Micron

Micron is a semiconductor company, the largest memory manufacturer in the United States. At Micron I am a member of Architecture Development Group, a team responsible for generating new product concepts and developing new lines of business.

As a member of a group with an entrepreneurial function my duties extend considerably beyond the norm for a Technical Marketing Manager, involving in addition to market analysis and development, a great deal of engagement on the scientific and engineering side and some hands-on R&D and management of engineering projects.

LSI, Tarari

Tarari was a venture-funded Intel Capital company which made hardware and software products for network and application acceleration. Tarari was acquired by LSI, a systems and semiconductor company, for $85M. I continued at LSI to lead the business unit I created for Tarari.

With the greater resources of LSI I made key contributions to bringing in over $120M of design wins for my business unit. At Tarari I built my business unit from the ground up, going from zero to millions of dollars in annual revenue and played an important role in making Tarari an attractive acquisition target for LSI.

As Senior Product Line Manager/Director of my business unit my duties have included:

Accomplishments

Education

U.C. Berkeley, 1994, BS-EECS Option C (Computer Science)
Major coursework focused in core computer science (e.g., algorithms, compilers) and computer architecture
Extensive elective coursework in Classical Arabic
Cray Research Scholarship, Kent Porter Memorial Scholarship (awarded by Doctor Dobb's Journal)

Additional coursework in Bioinformatics, Business and Management, Computer Science, Networking, Effective Communications, Foreign Languages and Writing

More Stuff

Patent Application

System and Method of Hardware-Assisted Assembly of Documents, DN/20100231975, Lemoine et al., September 16, 2010

Embodiments include systems and methods of hardware-assisted assembly of documents. For example, one embodiment comprises a memory configured to store documents and at least one processor configured to identify a template for generating a document. The template defines at least one field having a specified position and length within the document. The processor is further configured to store a copy of the template to the memory so as to initialize the document and to store characters based on data associated with the field to a location of the memory associated with the field. The processor further stores, based at least in part on the text and the length of the field, one or more indicators of at least one portion of the field to be removed from the document. The system further includes a circuit configured to read the document from the memory and remove the portion of the field based on the indicators. The system thus assembles an assembled document that is reduced in size relative to the initially generated template document.

Book Publications

Leventhal, Michael (principal author), Lewis, David, Fuchs, Matthew, Designing XML Internet Applications, Prentice-Hall, 1998.

The world's first book on the use of XML in the internet!

Leventhal, Michael, XML: Can the Desperate Perl Hacker Do It?, in XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques, O'Reilly & Associates, 1997. Reprinted in Web Techniques, Web Review, and <?XML.COM?>.

Is Perl a suitable language for programming XML? The use of Perl with XML is illustrated in this article with a program that checks to see if an XML document is well-formed. The relative simplicity of the program demonstrates that lightweight Perl programs may be used with XML, although Unicode and the use of entities make it difficult for Perl programmers to handle some XML files.

Culshaw, Stuart, Leventhal, Michael, and Maloney, Murray, XML and CSS, in XML: Principles, Tools, and Techniques, O'Reilly & Associates, 1997. Reprinted in Web Review, and <?XML.COM?>, and portions used in Byte, March 1998.

The simplicity of document creation was a key element in the astonishingly rapid development of the Web. This article describes XML and CSS: the "one-two" punch that will not only bring back that level of simplicity, but also enable the construction of complex applications which are either difficult or impossible using HTML. In this article we outline the steps for using an CSS style sheet in an XML document; we discuss the limitations of CSS in complex applications; and we present a real life example.

Standards Work

Contributor to the following W3C publications:
XML Binary Characterization, W3C Working Group Note 31 March 2005
XML Binary Characterization Measurement Methodologies, W3C Working Group Note 31 March 2005
XML Binary Characterization Properties, W3C Working Group Note 31 March 2005
XML Binary Characterization Use Cases, W3C Working Group Note 31 March 2005

The working group evaluated the need and feasibility of a "binary XML" recommendation. It included an analysis of which properties such a format must possess. It recommended that the W3C produce a "binary XML" recommendation and enumerated the minimum requirements which this "binary XML" recommendation must meet.

Industry Conference Papers and Presentations, Articles

Numerous papers and presentations at industry conferences including RSA, Interop, various XML Conferences, International Software Development Conference (JAOO), High Performance Technology on Wall Street as well as articles in the technical press. Some examples:

Lemoine, Eric and Leventhal, Michael, The XML Chip , presented at Balisage, Montreal, Canada, August 2009.

The history, design, operation and performance characteristics of a purpose-built XML chip is described. Our long-term implementation and commercialization experience has demonstrated that a purpose-built co-processor chip can significantly increase the overall performance of data-intensive applications which use XML for information transactions. Benchmark data showing large gains in message throughput, message latency and reduction of power consumption for XML operations is presented. Processing of XML in the gigabit per second range is obtained, showing that some complex operations on XML data can be done at line-rate in networking devices. Acceleration is also obtained using the XML chip with enterprise applications where load is well below the gigabit range and XML processing may not constitute the largest portion of the CPU workload due to the synergistic effects of processor offload. The workload efficiency of XML co-processing has been demonstrated to increase with the parallel capacity of multicore platforms.

Lemoine, Eric, Leventhal, Michael, and Williams, Steve, Binary Showdown, published in The XML Journal, October 29, 2003

On September 24 the W3C set in motion a process that could radically change not only how XML is used and how XML-based applications are developed - but XML itself right down to its beloved (or detested) pointyangle brackets. "The W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Items Sets" brought together 34 interested parties divided among binary revolutionaries, pointyangle- bracket fundamentalists, and a number of fence-sitters to try to form a community consensus and to decide whether or not to move forward to a full W3C activity and a binary XML Recommendation.

Sun Certified Java Programmer (SCJP 1.4)

Life other than work

Good at languages, competent non-native French (DELF B2 83/100) and various degrees of many other languages.
Inline speedskating/racing, best result Northshore Marathon 2009, Open 44/2200 1:17:24, completed Athens-to-Atlanta Road Race (87 miles) 9 times

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