Rhodes Klement, Chair
Over the last 15 years, Rhodes has developed and refined a unique vision for the art and science of brand. Borrowing from his formal training in such divergent fields as organic chemistry, classical ballet, and teaching sign language to the mentally handicapped, Rhodes perceives and abstracts meaning from seemingly random data to reveal new business opportunities and identify patterns that inhibit or promote positive brand perception.

He is the co-founder of Branditecture, an agency that helps organizations build strong brands with strategy, identity and reputation management services.

Before starting Branditecure, Rhodes led global Brand and Advertising for Sun Microsystems where he drove efforts to revitalize and build the end-to-end brand experience for the Sun and Java brand families. With his passion for social change, Rhodes led the development of live audience participation campaigns using Sun technology at Live8 concerts and U2's recent Vertigo tour — where 500,000 people in 17 countries joined Bono's ONE campaign to raise awareness for HIV/AIDS, poverty and debt in Africa. Rhodes also produced similar events with ColdPlay and CurrentTV.

Rhodes offers brand strategy and brand experience consulting. He speaks internationally on brand experience, product design, usability and emerging marketing technologies and has been quoted in such publications as CMO Magazine, AdWeek, BrandWeek and CNet.

Andrew was recently named one of the fellows of the National Geographic Society and has served as futurist-in-residence at both Popular Science and American Demographics magazines, as well as Public Radio’s Marketplace.

Andrew is a network member of the Global Business Network, and serves as a visiting fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Foundation. In early 2005 he was named to Fast Company’s Fast 50, the magazine’s annual compilation of emerging business leaders. In the same year, he was named one of Red Herring’s “20 Under 35.”

John Legend, Director
John Legend is a five-time Grammy-winner and multi-platinum singer, songwriter, and performer who has been heralded as one of the most striking, vital and important American musical artists to emerge in the 21st century.

Legend, who began playing piano at the age of 4, made his name primarily as an in-demand all-star studio session writer and musician, working with luminaries including Lauryn Hill, the Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys, Common and Kanye West.  In 2005, Legend's critically-acclaimed debut album, "Get Lifted," helped him earn an astounding eight Grammy nominations – tying Mariah Carey and Kanye West for the most nominations for any individual artist or band that year – with the album selling more than three million copies worldwide.  In 2006, John’s second release, "Once Again," quickly achieved an RIAA platinum certification and brought him a Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance (for "Heaven").

In 2007, inspired by reading "The End Of Poverty" by Columbia University Professor Dr. Jeffrey Sachs, John Legend traveled to Ghana in West Africa where he recognized "the real, tangible impact of extreme poverty on millions of people around the world."  His response was to launch the Show Me Campaign ( HYPERLINK "http://www.ShowMeCampaign.org" www.ShowMeCampaign.org), a grassroots movement whose mission is "to fight economic and spiritual poverty through fostering sustainable development (personal, social, educational, economic) at the individual, family, and small community levels."

Rich Frankel, Director
Rich is the founder of RFD Productions and is an active producer and creator of integrated Web, DVD and TV content for corporate and entertainment industry clients. Rich recently produced two multiple Emmy Award–winning programs, featuring the work of rock icon Sting, which were simultaneously released across Web and DVD platforms as well. Rich previously served as the managing director of the Los Angeles office of THINK New Ideas. THINK developed integrated online and offline advertising for technology clients and software companies. Among its LA clients were Oracle, Network Associates, PreviewTravel.com, Miramax Films and CarsDirect.com.

Before joining THINK, Rich ran the Creative Services Group at A&M Records, where he developed the visual imaging of The Police, Suzanne Vega, Joe Jackson, Sting, Janet Jackson, Sheryl Crow, Amy Grant, Supertramp and Soundgarden. At A&M, he produced award-winning short and long-form music videos. Two were awarded Grammys: “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation” in 1989 and Sting’s “Ten Summoner’s Tales” in 1993. Before his decade at A&M, Rich was Warner Amex Satellite’s corporate creative director on the team that launched MTV, Nickelodeon and The Movie Channel.

Her firm, Heller Communication Design, has developed a process through which corporations can play a leading role in alleviating the social and environmental issues facing the world, through programs that are both easy and profitable for them.

Cheryl has written articles for Communication Arts, ID Magazine, Graphis Magazine and The Design Management Journal. She wrote a book for the AIGA on the best process for preserving innovation within corporations. Recently she wrote the lead story on creative strategy for Adobe’s online magazine, Proxy.

She has been profiled in articles in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Graphis magazine, Communication Arts, ID magazine, How magazine, Print and PDN.

Andrew Rasiej, Director
Andrew is the founder and current chairman of MOUSE (Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education). He has also served on the New York City Board of Education's task force on technology and has spearheaded several innovative projects that support efforts to bridge the “Digital Divide” in public education.

Andrew is the chairman and co-founder of the Digital Club Network (DCN), the Internet's largest live music channel. DCN broadcasts concerts of established and emerging artists from premier music venues around the world and makes archived recordings of these performances available for free over the Internet. Concurrent with his involvement in music and technology,He is also co-founder of the world's largest annual digital music conference, “Plug In,” which is attended by executives from major record labels and technology companies.

Steven Koltai, Director
Steven Koltai is a strategic planner, entrepreneur and social action philanthropist with a 30-year career as an international investment banker, entertainment industry executive, and entrepreneur. 

For 8 years, Steven was a senior executive at Warner Bros, serving as Corporate SVP for Strategy and a member of the 3-person Operating Committee.  He founded Warner Bros Interactive Entertainment and Warner Bros. Online, and oversaw the creation of the first-ever Hollywood Studio produced content for the Internet.

As an entrepreneur, Steven founded or co-founded two companies.  SES/Astra is the world’s largest commercial television satellite company, and delivers most of the cable television in Europe, North Africa and the Mideast.  Event411.com is a leading developer of online event planning and event-related social networking tools.  When Steven sold Event411 in 2002, the company was serving over two dozen Fortune 500 corporate clients, and had provided event management software for the 2000 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles and the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Steven currently serves as a private consultant in both for-profit and not-for-profit ventures – including a 15-month assignment as strategy advisor to Lifetime Television.  He is very active in not-for-profit organizations as both a philanthropist and activist, particularly in the issue of literacy.

Sarah Laskin, Director

Sarah Laskin is Vice President and COO for Mission Programs at the
National Geographic Society. Through the Mission Programs Special Projects group, she oversees the Explorers Program, including the Society's relationships with the Explorers-in-Residence, the NG Fellows, and the Emerging Explorers, and key program initiatives such as the Enduring Voices Project and Genographic. In 2004, she was among the founders of National Geographic's All Roads Film Project, which showcases breakthrough film and still photography from indigenous and under-represented minority cultures around the globe. She currently serves on the All Roads Advisory Board.

She is also a member of the Society's Conservation Trust, a grant-making committee which supports conservation of the world's biological and cultural diversity.  Prior to joining National Geographic in 2000, Sarah worked on ocean, coastal, and fishery policy issues in the Clinton/Gore Administration as Associate Director for Fisheries and Coastal Issues at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. She also held the positon of Program Examiner for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration programs at the White House's Office of Management and Budget. She was involved in organizing the U.S. Commerce Department and U.S. Navy's National Ocean Conference in 1998, and was a co-author of the Clinton Cabinet's "Looking to the Sea: America's Ocean Future," a special report on ocean policy.

Bill Gordon, Director
Bill Gordon is a serial entrepreneur originally trained as a cellular and molecular biologist.  He is founder and Managing Partner of WEG Family LLC, a private investment company.

Bill returned to science after a long hiatus in 2004 through WEG Family LLC when he helped launch a biotechnology startup, Tetragenetics Inc, for which he is now President and CEO.  This cutting-edge company is on the verge of producing a number of breakthrough vaccines and biotherapeutics, and is committed to making all of its technology available in the fight against diseases of poverty in the developing world.

Prior to starting WEG Family LLC, Bill co-founded Callahan Associates International, a communications development company focused on acquiring, developing, and managing communication ventures around the globe, including building and operating broadband systems throughout Europe.

Bill’s first entrepreneurial venture started when he joined Quion Financial, where he helped launch private equity-funded businesses focused on communications and other aspects of infrastructure in Southeast Asia.  Prior to Quion, he had a successful career on Wall Street in the asset management business, after being trained as a cellular and molecular biologist and earning a Ph.D. from U.C. Berkeley.

Advisory Board Members

Malcolm Gladwell
Author and New Yorker magazine journalist Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, has been a tremendous bestseller for three years and counting. Malcolm has the uncanny ability to interpret research findings and tantalizing theories in sociology and other fields and apply them to business and organizational problems to generate value.

 In The Tipping Point, Malcolm explains the dynamics of trends and helps organizations apply this knowledge to their own business strategies. He shows how ideas and trends start and spread, and offers tools for igniting, steering and/or sustaining trends that matter, whether in business, society, politics, technology or consumer behavior. He also helps organizations identify the types of people who are crucial to the trend process and deploy their talents strategically.

His latest release, Blink – “about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye,” and the powerful conclusions we draw in those moments – appeared on the bestseller charts as soon as it was published in 2005.

In 2001 Juan wrote “Transforming Life, Transforming Business: The Life Science Revolution” (co-authored with Ray Goldberg) in The Digital Enterprise (HBS Press), for which he won a McKinsey Prize. He also wrote “Technology, Gene Research and National Competitiveness” in Globalization and the Rural Environment (DRCLAS/Harvard University Press). He has authored more than a dozen Harvard Business School case studies, as well as articles for such  publications  as Science, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and Trends in Biotechnology. He is contributing editor of The Journal of Biolaw and Business.

In 2000, Ethan founded Geekcorps, a nonprofit technology volunteer corps. Geekcorps pairs skilled volunteers from US and European high-tech companies with businesses in emerging nations for one- to four-month volunteer tours. More than 3,500 technical experts have shared their talents and experience in more than a dozen developing nations, including Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Vietnam and Morocco. Geekcorps became a division of the International Executive Service Corps in 2001, where Ethan served as a vice president from 2001–2004.

Chris Jordan
Chris Jordan is an internationally acclaimed photographic artist and social activist whose work explores the detritus of American mass culture. His newest series, titled “Running the Numbers,” depicts the staggering statistics that define our mass behaviors, in huge, intricately detailed panels as large as thirty feet wide.

These astonishing works invite the viewer to walk up close and see every detail as a metaphor for the role of the individual in our hypermodern society. Chris’s work is exhibited widely in the US and Europe, and has been featured in magazines, newspapers, weblogs, documentary films and television programs all over the globe.

In the Spring of 2008, Chris served as an international spokesperson for National Geographic in their global campaign for Earth Day 2008. A sought-after speaker on the subject of mass culture, Chris has appeared on several national television programs recently. He lives in Seattle with his wife the poet Victoria Sloan Jordan, and his son Emerson.

Carolyn Porco
Carolyn is the leader of the Imaging Science Team on the Cassini mission presently orbiting Saturn, and a lead imaging scientist on the New Horizons Pluto/Kuiper Belt mission, which launched in January, 2006. She is a veteran imaging scientist of the Voyager mission to the outer solar system in the 1980s. She received her PhD in 1983 from the California Institute of Technology.

Carolyn is the director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, where Cassini images are collected, processed and released to the public, and an adjunct professor at both the University of Colorado and the University of Arizona. She is also the CEO of Diamond Sky Productions, a small company devoted to the scientific, as well as artful, use of planetary images and computer graphics for the presentation of science to the public.

Carolyn has been an active participant in guiding the American planetary exploration program over the last 15 years through membership on a host of NASA advisory committees, and in 2001/2002 was the vice chairperson for the steering group of the Solar System Decadal Survey, sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and NASA.

Her contributions to the exploration of the outer solar system have been recognized with the naming of Asteroid (7231) Porco.

Jakob Trollbäck
Jakob is a self-taught DJ-turned-designer, founder and creative director of Trollbäck + Company.

Trollbäck + Company is a bicoastal creative studio committed to generating innovative visual and branding solutions. The company works across a variety of media, from film titles and trailers to TV commercials, environmental and architectural installations, branding, advertising and magazine and book design. 

Stephen Hand
Steve is President and CTO of Know Technology, the IT solutions and support company that he founded in 1998. Steve has 22 years of IT experience in a variety of industries including retail, finance and telecommunications throughout the US and in the Middle East. Dedicated to Maine’s IT community, Steve sits on the MESDA board of directors and serves as the chairman of the Maine Technology Institute IT board.  Steve is among the few who have been involved in the production of Pop!Tech since its beginning in 1997.

Since the mid-’70s, Harvey's work has been entirely freelance. Over the years, he's written and published 20 books, including two spy novels, as well as dozens of documentary television shows and series for PBS, the Discovery Channel and Turner Broadcasting. He’s currently at work on his third spy novel, Tunnel Vision. Last year, he was an entrant in the International Whistling Contest.

Ardman joined Pop!Tech at its second meeting and served as program director for several years. He lives with his wife and teenage son in Rockport, Maine.

While an engineer-scientist (1965–1979), Bob helped build the early Internet. In 1973, at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, he invented Ethernet, the local-area networking (LAN) standard on which he shares four patents. In 2003, Ethernet’s 30th year, 184 million new Ethernet connections were shipped for $12.5 billion.

While an entrepreneur-executive (1979–1990), Bob founded 3Com Corporation, the billion-dollar networking company, where at various times he was chairman, CEO, division general manager, and vice president of engineering, sales, and marketing.

While a publisher-pundit (1990–2000), Bob was CEO of IDG's InfoWorld Publishing Company (1992–1995). For eight years, he wrote an Internet column read weekly by more than 500,000 information technologists. He spoke often; appeared on radio, television, and the web; and produced conferences, including ACM97, ACM1, Agenda, Pop!Tech, and Vortex.

Bob’s book credits include Packet Communication (Thomson), Internet Collapses and Other InfoWorld Punditry (IDG Books), and Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing (co-edited for Springer Verlag).

John Sculley
John is former president and CEO of Pepsi; former CEO of Apple Computer; high-tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist.

Named “Man of the Year” by Financial World, “CEO of the Decade” by Financial News Network and “Advertising Man of the Year” by Adweek as well as Ad Age, John draws from his boardroom experiences to offer valuable insight into leading change, the new global marketplace and the innovative concepts companies are developing to transform business.

John was Pepsi’s CEO for five years, during which time the company’s successful “Pepsi Generation” and “Pepsi Challenge” marketing campaigns enabled the brand to become the largest-selling packaged goods in America.

In 1983, Steve Jobs recruited John to Apple to bring big-brand marketing to the high-tech industry. Together, Jobs and Sculley successfully launched Macintosh and desktop publishing. During John’s decade as Apple's CEO, Macintosh went on to become the #1-selling PC in the world.

Since leaving Apple, John has pursued venture capitalism. Successful early-stage companies he worked with, which either went public and/or were sold, include Professional SportsCare, Select Comfort, NFO Research, Intralinks, Hotwire and InPhonic.