Ovidiu Dan
Co-founder of GeoScaling.com and Newistic.com. Co-founder of Playfuls Entertainment (sold in 2007).
| Headline: | Entrepreneur |
| Work status: | Full-Time Student |
| Website: | http://www.ovidiudan.com/ |
| Skills: | AJAX, Business, C/C++, Database Administration, Databases, Engineering, Entrepreneurship, Java, Languages and Platforms, Leadership, PHP, Public speaking, Software Engineering, System Administration, Unix, Web Development |
| Location: | Easton, Pennsylvania, USA |
| Interested in: | Brainstorming, Finding business partners, Finding cofounders, Finding team mates, Meeting new people, Professional opportunities, Promoting my startups, Recruiting for my startup |
| Schools: | Hogeschool INHOLLAND, Lehigh University |
FEATURED STARTUP
GeoScaling
GeoScaling
GeoScaling provides scaling services to startups. GeoScaling DNS2 is a DNS server which redirects users based on country, city, latitude, longitude, uptime information, network name (AS), server loads, and other information.
- Startup type: Company
- Status: Active
- Stage: Beta
WORK EXPERIENCE
| Employer: | Several clients from US and Romania |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | December 2006 - Present |
| Description: | Linux Administrator and Programmer for several clients from US and Romania. Rentsmarty.net promotes my consulting services. |
| Employer: | Newistic.com |
| Position: | Co-founder |
| Time period: | December 2004 - Present |
| Description: | Co-founder of Newistic.com, a startup working on large-scale web mining projects. |
| Employer: | Google Summer of Code 2008 |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | May 2008 - July 2008 |
| Description: | PHP (Scalability) - Funded by Google to work on an open source project via their Google Summer of Code 2008 program. I extended the Coppermine Photo Gallery to allow flexible mirroring and distributed photo storage. |
| Employer: | Asian Human Rights Commission |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | December 2007 - November 2008 |
| Description: | Plone/Python - 5-month internship at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. I helped them develop their new website (not yet online) using the Plone CMS, which is written in Python. |
| Employer: | “Papiu” high-school |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | December 2007 - November 2008 |
| Description: | Designed and built a gigabit network backbone for “Papiu” high-school, Romania (switches, routers, media converters, racks, wiring, Linux server administration). |
| Employer: | cryocopy.com |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | December 2006 - November 2007 |
| Description: | Built a Linux-based solution for taking ~real-time screenshots of websites on demand, for cryocopy.com. |
| Employer: | tvkon.com |
| Position: | Work experience |
| Time period: | December 2005 - November 2007 |
| Description: | PHP/MySQL - Wrote the content management system for tvkon.com, a video streaming website. Also built a Linux/MPlayer/Bash-based solution for encoding any kind of video files into flv (Flash Video) streaming files. |
| Employer: | Playfuls Entertainment |
| Position: | Co-founder |
| Time period: | December 2001 - November 2007 |
| Description: | Co-founder of Playfuls Entertainment. I had several roles in the company, starting from network administrator to programmer and team manager. I sold it in 2006 to Netbridge Investments to pay for college, but I remained a technical consultant until 2007. The main website, playfuls.com, had 3 million visitors / month at its peak. |
| Employer: | Playfuls Entertainment |
| Position: | Network administrator and web programmer |
| Time period: | December 2001 - November 2007 |
| Description: | Network administrator and web programmer for Playfuls Entertainment. Designed and implemented most of the underlying content management system for jucaushii.ro and playfuls.com. Built a distributed content serving infrastructure with PHP/MySQL+Squid. Worked with database replication and file synchronization between the servers. I configured firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems and wrote a few network monitoring scripts. |
| Employer: | SpareTimeGroup.net |
| Position: | Network administrator |
| Time period: | December 2001 - November 2005 |
| Description: | Network administrator for the SpareTimeGroup.net NGO. I worked with web servers (Apache, lighttpd), database servers (MySQL, PostgreSQL), domain-name servers (Tinydns/DjbDNS, BIND), e-mail servers (Qmail, Sendmail), Samba etc. I worked with many Linux distributions including Fedora, Debian, Suse, Slackware and Gentoo. |
| Employer: | "Papiu" high-school, Romania |
| Position: | Network administrator |
| Time period: | December 2000 - November 2005 |
| Description: | Network administrator for "Papiu" high-school, Romania. My job consisted of managing 3 Linux servers and ~60 workstations scattered throughout the building. I helped the school build a wired network infrastructure to get the network on every floor. |
| Employer: | STG NGO |
| Position: | Web programmer |
| Time period: | December 2000 - November 2004 |
| Description: | PHP/MySQL - Worked as a web programmer at the STG NGO. My job was to write PHP frameworks for portals and e-commerce websites. Created six versions of the STG Portal, a framework for building content websites. |
EDUCATION
| University: | Lehigh University |
| Time period: | 2008 - 2013 |
| Degree: | Computer Science, PhD |
| University: | Hogeschool INHOLLAND |
| Time period: | 2004 - 2009 |
| Degree: | Information Technology, BEng |
PUBLICATIONS
| Papers: | • O. Dan, H. Mocian, Scalable Web Mining with Newistic, The 13th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD-09), April 2009
• O. Dan, H. Mocian, Newistic: a distributed news gathering and analysis platform. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligent Systems '09, Chennai, India, January 2009 2009 • O. Dan, H. Mocian, StorCH: A Distributed Self-Organizing Storage System, 2006 |
INFORMATION
| Memberships: | • Member of the Association for Computing Machinery
2007 » Present • Member of the SIGKDD Special Interest Group 2008 » Present |
| Awards: | • YEurope – Early Stage Venture Capital - part of one of the finalist teams. YEurope is a start-up incubator, which enables the winning teams to work on their project for 3 months in Vienna, where they are given seed funding and logistical, legal, and managerial assistance (www.yeurope.net).
2007 • ICUBE - Innovation Initiative Incubator - part of one of the winning teams. ICUBE is a technology startup competition that enables the three winning teams to travel in the United States, where they have the opportunity to connect with venture capitalists and other entrepreneurs (www.icube.ro). 2006 • "Papiu" prize for academic excellence – awarded by my high school to a few students each years 2005 • Won 1st prize at several local computer projects contests. 2001 » 2005 • e-Idea e-commerce contest – first prize awarded by the Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology and dotCommerce Romania 2004 |
Ovidiu's Startups (2)
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GeoScaling
GeoScaling provides scaling services to startups. GeoScaling DNS2 is a DNS server which redirects users based on country, city, latitude, longitude, uptime information, network name (AS), server loads, and other information.
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Ovidiu is Following (85)
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blogrunner
Blogrunner is a news aggregator from The New York Times that monitors articles and blog posts and tracks news stories as they develop across the Web
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Newsbrane
Newsbrane recommends news stories and other online content to users based on their interests
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ALOQA
Aloqa is a mobile service that proactively notifies you of interesting places, events, music, movies and other activities near you. Instead of having to search, you can just look at your phone and see your favorite hotspots, activities and events.
Ovidiu's Contacts (5)
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Mihai Gheza
Romanian, 24, MSc in Engineering Management at Denmark's Technical University. Currently working as Sales Pipelining Specialist for IBM Denmark
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Dan Steketee
Entrepeneur with 13+ years of strategic and tactical consulting experience in the financial services, start-up and technology industries (BPM, Business Intelligence, KPI's,, Vendor Management, etc) .
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Niku Dutta
MBA-Dual (HR & Marketing). Working on my startup : Prana Rayi : Ala-Carte Social Media Solutions.