Management Team
Our team is committed to advancing productivity enhancing technology
Tasktop Technologies has assembled a leadership team that combines excellence in technical leadership and technology company management experience.
Mik Kersten, Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
Mik is responsible for Tasktop Technologies' corporate strategy and for providing world-class technical leadership for both Tasktop products and for the Eclipse Mylyn project, which he leads. Mik is an authority on task-based work, a popular speaker on the Eclipse and Mylyn technologies, and an Eclipse Board Member. He also has a history of open-source tool development having implemented the first tool support for aspect-oriented programming tool support with plug-ins for JBuilder, NetBeans, Visual Studio, and Emacs. He conceived of the task-focused interface technology and created Mylyn while completing his PhD at the University of British Columbia. Mik's passion is building tools that offload our brains and make it easier to get creative work done.
Gail Murphy, Chair, Chief Operating Officer & Co-Founder
Gail is responsible for board management, for corporate finances and human for resources. Gail is a leading researcher on software evolution and tools. She brings to Tasktop her years of experience as a software developer and as the principal investigator of a large research group. In recognition of her research, Gail has been a keynote speaker at several software engineering conferences and has also received both national awards, such as the NSERC Steacie fellowship, and international awards, such as the AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize and a University of Washington College of Engineering Diamond Award. She also holds an appointment as a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia where she works on human-oriented software development tools to make software developers more efficient and effective.
Neelan Choksi, Board Member
Neelan is a member of the board of directors for Tasktop Technologies. He also is the Chief Operating Officer of Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza, the most popular ebook reader for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch. Neelan has extensive technology management experience, most recently having served at the COO of SpringSource (formerly Interface21), the venture backed open source infrastructure software company behind the Spring Framework. Prior to SpringSource, Neelan served as co-founder and President of SolarMetric, a leading object relational mapping provider, which was acquired by BEA Systems (NASDAQ: BEAS) in 2005. At BEA, Neelan was instrumental in the open sourcing of the acclaimed object/relational mapping tool Kodo as OpenJPA. Prior to SolarMetric, Neelan worked for Andersen Consulting Strategic Services (NYSE: ACN) and Exxon Research & Engineering (NYSE: XOM). Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the often-publicized MIT Blackjack team) and holds graduate degrees from Stevens Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Choksi currently serves on the board of directors of SpringSource and Tasktop Technologies.
Stephen Smith, Advisor
Stephen Smith serves as a key advisor in the Tasktop management team. Stephen is the founder and President of Webnames.ca and has over fifteen years of experience in information technology, specializing in project management and business development within the public and private sector. Prior to starting Webnames.ca in 2000, Stephen was Manager of information technology transfer at the University of British Columbia and Director of Business Development for Ingenuity Works Inc. A finalist for Ernst & Young's 2005 Entrepreneur of the Year Awards for Information Technology in the Pacific Region, Stephen is also a recipient of Business in Vancouver`s Top 40 Under 40 Award for Outstanding Achievement (2005). Steve acts as a mentor to new entrepreneurs in the New Ventures BC Program (2006 and 2007).
