The people who create Crowdynews
Crowdynews is founded and built by Edwin Kuipers. In 2007 he started Elkoog, a company to develop internet applications based on Artificial Intelligence. He worked in close cooperation with Groningen University. After some serious other try-outs, in 2010 Kuipers combined the richness of Twitter with the power of his algorithms in Crowdynews.
Immediately after its launch Crowdynews found its way to customers: newspaper sites started to implement the widgets in their sites. First customer signed his contract in March 2011 and after 6 months 25 others had signed up.
Meanwhile the organization of Crowdynews is growing: here are our staff members.
Edwin Kuipers – Founder and CTO
Edwin Kuipers founded Crowdynews in 2010. Kuipers holds a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing from the University of Groningen. The algorithms used by the engine of Crowdynews are developed by Kuipers. “The real art is the tweaking of these algorithms, so that they are ultimately usable for the peculiarities of Tweets,” says Kuipers. Before he launched Crowdynews, Kuipers founded the software services company ‘Buyways’.
Bert Wiggers - CEO
Bert Wiggers started his career as a journalist within VNU (United Dutch Publishers). In 1993 he launched intermediair.nl: the first commercial internet site in the Netherlands. As a member of the management team of Ilse Media he was responsible for the popular Dutch internet sites Startpagina.nl, NU.nl and Kieskeurig.nl. ‘The speed of development of Crowdynews is really impressive. This was the main reason I joined the company,’ says Wiggers.
André Beijers – CFO
After graduating from the Erasmus University André Beijers joined Unilever. He served the company as a Finance&IT director in Asia and South America. After working in senior positions with Avebe in Holland and the Lenzing group (worldleader in viscose) in Austria, he decided to join Crowdynews. Beijers says: "Crowdynews has the unique capability to merge verified news with social and emotional news,which creates tremendous business-opportunities."
Willem Wolvers - Manager Relations
Willem Wolvers traded in the early 90’s bulk chemicals with Russia, in a partnership with Brenntag AG. Later he invested in IT-companies. Willem joined Crowdynews early 2010 as interim CEO till August 2011 and mapped out the strategy to start Crowdynews's activities in the USA. "I am happy Bert took over my position as CEO, so I can focus on creating partnerships with media companies in the rest of the world".
Jeroen Zanen - Manager Relations
Zanen studied “Management, Economics and Law” at the “Hanzehogeschool Groningen”. After a successful soccer career, Zanen founded several flourishing companies in Groningen. Zanen: ”Crowdynews will play an important role in the online news market, that generates worldwide 1,200 billion page views a year. Together with our local partners, we will gain a serious share of that market”.
Henry Chung - representative USA
Before joining Crowdynews, Henry Chung was an independent media consultant. Chung has more than 20 years experience in media finance, including senior finance and planning positions in both start-ups and large publishing companies (amongst which Hearst Newspapers). Henry holds an MBA in Finance from New York University and a BS in Economics and Management from Carnegie-Mellon University. Henry Chung is based in New York.
Sarah Garrison - representative USA
Sarah Garrison has a long track record in connecting digital media to newspapers. She started in the newsroom, as a new media editor at The Daily Herald. Later she has been project leader in numerous digital projects connecting Yahoo! content to digital properties of Media Newsgroup. Before joining Crowdynews she was at Zillow.com held responsible for migrating the 700+ newspapers involved in the Yahoo! Newspaper Consortium onto the Zillow real estate platform. Sarah lives in Seattle.
Ian Wright - representative UK
Prior to establishing Digital Media Consultants Ian has gained over 16 years award winning expertise in multi-channel marketing for leading international blue chip companies. Ian has also worked for some of the UK’s leading media companies such as ITV and Newsquest media. “I have been very impressed with the exciting opportunities Crowdy News offers to online publishers and the online marketplace as a whole”
Giel Stekelenburg - Systems Architect
Giel Stekelenburg has more than a decade of experience in challenging and innovative projects in resarch and software engineering. He has worked for companies like Shell, Rabobank, KPN/Qwest and major touroperators. Giel specialised in building secure, high traffic fully automated webshops and in designing custom highperformance databases from scratch. Crowdynews brings a lot of these challenges together.
Gerben van Eerten – Artificial Intelligence Specialist
Gerben van Eerten holds a degree in Artifial Intelligence. Besides that, he studied Philosophy and Mathematics. Van Eerten works on the development and implementation of the core algorithms that are used by the engine of Crowdynews. "The challenge is to integrate human knowledge with computing power, using statistical analysis and the ever expanding web", says Gerben.
Hessel Hoogendorp - Systems engineer
Hessel Hoogendorp holds a master's degree in Computing Science from the University of Groningen in The Netherlands. In the past, he designed and implemented company-wide, fully integrated backoffice software solutions, with a focus on high degree of automation.
Jorne Dassen - Systems Engineer
Jorne Dassen studied Bioinformatics. He and his team have created and are maintaining the rapid server deployment system for Crowdynews customers. Jorne is always looking for new technologies to improve the technological foundation of Crowdynews. "Finding all that's good and then connect the dots...", says Jorne.