Zignal Labs

Jim Hornthal

Chairman and CEO

As Chairman and CEO, Jim helps set the strategic direction for Zignal Labs, drawing on his decades of experience in managing successful emerging growth companies. His approach is based on the commitment to assemble the brightest cohort of passionate and creative minds to tackle seemingly impossible problems.

As an entrepreneur, Jim is best known as the Founder and Chairman of Preview Travel, a pioneer in the online travel industry.  Jim took Preview Travel public in 1997, and later initiated its merger with a division of Sabre Holdings to create Travelocity.com, where he served as the founding Vice Chairman until Sabre acquired the company in 2002.

Jim is currently the founder and Chairman of Triporati, whose “Destination Genome Project” is changing how travelers can discover their perfect vacation.   Jim is also the co-founder and Chairman of LaunchPad Central, a platform for startup companies to effectively deploy and manage the customer discovery process.

Jim sits on the board of KIND Snacks and Via.com (Bangalore, India), and is a trustee of The One Voice Movement.

Jim has been working with entrepreneurs to help them turn their great ideas into great businesses as a professor of entrepreneurship, co-teaching the Lean LaunchPad course for the Berkeley-Columbia MBA programs and at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where he is a Lester Center Fellow.

He has also taught the course for the National Science Foundation's iCorps program at Stanford, and will be teaching the course this fall at Princeton, where is is the James Wei Visiting Professor in Entrepreneurship.

Jim is an active member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a delegate to the Skoll World Forum, Co-Chairman of YPO's American-Arab Action Forum, and a founding member of the Clinton Global Initiative.

Josh Ginsberg

Co-Founder

Josh Ginsberg applies his extensive political and public affairs experience to Zignal Labs product and business development. A veteran of three presidential campaigns, multiple statewide campaigns, and national campaign committees, he has firsthand experience on the value of real-time information and the need for quick, efficient action.

In 2010 he served as Campaign Manager for Chris Dudley’s gubernatorial campaign in Oregon. Prior to that he was Vice President at Mercury Public Affairs in Sacramento and was Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Political Director. Before working for Schwarzenegger, he served as National Field Director for Mitt Romney’s 2008 Presidential campaign where he managed a national grassroots organization in more than 30 states.

Josh also served as Deputy Political Director for Governor Schwarzenegger’s 2006 reelection campaign, worked in the Strategy Department at the Republican National Committee, and served on both the 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns for President George W. Bush. Named by Politics Magazine as one of their 2009 Rising Stars, Josh brings with him more than a decade of political and public affairs experience.

Josh currently lives in Sacramento with his wife, Joahn, and is a graduate of Vanderbilt University.

Adam Beaugh

Co-Founder

Adam Beaugh’s creativity, technological knowledge and sound intuitive thinking are the driving force behind Zignal Labs product offering. As a leading web developer, and social/digital media strategist, Adam has led many high profile technology campaigns from the ground up, both in politics and the wine industry.

In 2007, Adam took on the challenge of transforming a static website into an intuitively-designed digital communications platform for the Governor of Texas.  After launching the new platform, he managed digital content creation and social media outreach and measurement for his office.

More recently, Adam served as the Director of Digital Communications for Jackson Family Wines, where he created a social & digital media department for their 30+ wine brands from the ground up. In just two years, Adam established Kendall-Jackson and other brands of Jackson Family Wines as the wine industry’s best-practices innovator on a digital communications level.

An avid foodie and outdoorsman, he has a strong interest in big data, social CRM, collaborative intelligence, mobile computing, and data visualization.

Adam lives in the Bay Area and has a Business Degree from Texas A&M University.

Jay Ashton

Jay is the co-founder and CEO of Revinate, the leading social media solution for the hospitality industry. Prior to Revinate Jay was President of Five Star Alliance, an online travel agency for luxury hotels. Jay helped grow the company into a major player in the luxury hotel market, driving significant business for the world's best hotels. Five Star Alliance was sold to Questex Media in 2007.

Previously, Jay ran development at Epinions.com (now Shopping.com, owned by eBay) and led the development of one of Japan's first major e-commerce portals at Digital Garage. Jay graduated from Williams College and received his MBA from the Darden Graduate School of Business Administration.

Sir Timothy Berners-Lee

In 1989, while working at at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, Tim Berners-lee proposed a global hypertext project, to be known as the World Wide Web. Based on the earlier “Enquire” work, it was designed to allow people to work together by combining their knowledge in a web of hypertext documents. He wrote the first World Wide Web server, “httpd”, and the first client, “WorldWideWeb” a what-you-see-is-what-you-get hypertext browser/editor which ran in the NeXTStep environment. This work was started in October 1990, and the program “WorldWideWeb” first made available within CERN in December, and on the Internet at large in the summer of 1991.

Through 1991 and 1993, Tim continued working on the design of the Web, coordinating feedback from users across the Internet. His initial specifications of URIs, HTTP and HTML were refined and discussed in larger circles as the Web technology spread.

Tim Berners-Lee graduated from the Queen’s College at Oxford University, England, 1976. Whilst there he built his first computer with a soldering iron, TTL gates, an M6800 processor and an old television.

He spent two years with Plessey Telecommunications Ltd (Poole, Dorset, UK) a major UK Telecom equipment manufacturer, working on distributed transaction systems, message relays, and bar code technology.

In 1978 Tim left Plessey to join D.G Nash Ltd (Ferndown, Dorset, UK), where he wrote among other things typesetting software for intelligent printers, and a multitasking operating system.

A year and a half spent as an independent consultant included a six month stint (Jun-Dec 1980) as consultant software engineer at CERN. Whilst there, he wrote for his own private use his first program for storing information including using random associations. Named “Enquire” and never published, this program formed the conceptual basis for the future development of the World Wide Web.

From 1981 until 1984, Tim worked at John Poole’s Image Computer Systems Ltd, with technical design responsibility. Work here included real time control firmware, graphics and communications software, and a generic macro language. In 1984, he took up a fellowship at CERN, to work on distributed real-time systems for scientific data acquisition and system control. Among other things, he worked on FASTBUS system software and designed a heterogeneous remote procedure call system.

In 1994, Tim founded the World Wide Web Consortium at the then Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) which merged with the Artificial Intelligence Lab in 2003 to become the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Since that time he has served as the Director of the World Wide Web Consortium a Web standards organization which develops interoperable technologies (specifications, guidelines, software, and tools) to lead the Web to its full potential. The Consortium has host sites located at MIT, at ERCIM in Europe, and at Keio University in Japan as well as Offices around the world.

In 1999, he became the first holder of the 3Com Founders chair. He is currently the 3COM Founders Professor of Engineering in the School of Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at CSAIL where he also heads the Decentralized Information Group (DIG). In December 2004 he was named a Professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southampton, UK. He was co-Director of the Web Science Trust, launched in 2006 as the Web Science Research Initiative, to help create the first multidisciplinary research body to examine the World Wide Web and offer the practical solutions needed to help guide its future use and design. He is a Director of the World Wide Web Foundation, started in 2008 to fund and coordinate efforts to further the potential of the Web to benefit humanity.

In June 2009 then Prime Minister Gordon Brown announced that Sir Tim Berners-Lee would work with the UK Government to help make data more open and accessible on the Web, building on the work of the Power of Information Task Force. Sir Tim is currently a member of The Public Sector Transparency Board to drive forward the UK Government’s transparency agenda.

He is the author, with Mark Fischetti, of the book “Weaving the Web” on the the past present and future of the Web.

Ben Coffey Clark

Ben Coffey Clark is a partner at Bully Pulpit Interactive - the largest digital marketer of the Democratic Party and brand –where he is responsible for client services and new business.

Ben relies on a broad digital background to help clients online. Over the past decade he has worked as a political operative, consultant and journalist.

Ben is a veteran of several political campaigns. He served as a Get Out The Vote coordinator for southeastern Ohio for President Obama's 2008 campaign and got his start in Iowa working for Howard Dean in the 2004 primary. He spent the reminder of the cycle with the Running for Change Political Action Committee, a Web-based grassroots PAC that raised over a million dollars on behalf of John Kerry. Since then, he has played a role in several high profile campaigns including Rahm Emanuel’s recent mayoral campaign.

Prior to Bully Pulpit Interactive he worked in Fleishman-Hillard's Washington, D.C., office where he was Co-Chair of the Global Public Affairs Group and ran award-winning issue advocacy campaigns, most notably for PR week's 2010 Public Affairs Campaign of the Year. Ben also pioneered a digital public affairs practice for The Harbour Group, a K street crisis communications firm.

A former political reporter in Rhode Island, Ben was the first editorial director for the Washingtonian magazine's website and successfully re-branded the online publication.

Christopher E. Clouser

Christopher E. Clouser serves as Chairman of the Board and Chairman of the Executive Committee of the International Tennis Hall of Fame & Museum.  He has held senior officer positions with Northwest Airlines, Preview Travel, Bell Atlantic, the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), Sprint, Hallmark Cards, and the Minnesota Twins.  Clouser currently serves on the Board of Acorn Energy (NASDAQ: ACFN), Taste of the NFL and D&D Holdings.

Previously, Clouser served on the Board of Piper Jaffray Inc., Mall of America, Transamerica Retirement, Marquette Bancshares, Pepsi Americas, the Minnesota Twins and the Harlem Globetrotters Foundation.  He began his career as Special Assistant to United States Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri from 1973 – 1981.

Clouser resides in Wellington, Florida.

Tammy Haddad

Tammy Haddad is a media innovator whose clients include some of the top companies in the world. She is the veteran television executive producer behind Hardball, Larry King Live, the Today Show, and The Late Late Show.

Haddad has more than 25 years of experience as an executive producer of web, cable and network programs. She is best known as the creator and executive producer of CNN’s Larry King Live, and helped launch the now-famous outdoor studio of NBC’s Today Show while serving as senior broadcast producer. Haddad later became MSNBC’s Vice President of Washington and Political Director in charge of the 2004 Presidential and 2006 Midterm election coverage, and Executive Producer of Hardball with Chris Matthews.

Founded in 2007, Haddad Media clients works with media companies such as Bloomberg, Google, HBO, Politico, The Washington Post, Newsweek, and National Journal. Haddad Media has created and producedmulti-media high profile events such as the Washington Ideas Forum: The First Draft of History, the Bloomberg Washington Summit, and The Week Opinion Awards. Haddad is a consultant to HBO’s comedy series, "Veep".

Haddad's "Tam Cam" handheld video interview series, launched for Newsweek and appeared in Politico, has made headlines and Drudge sirens. Her guests include major public figures from candidate Barack Obama to Robert DeNiro. She is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of WHCInsider.com, the White House Correspondents Insider website covering political and media culture.

Haddad is such a Washington, DC institution that Christopher Buckley made her a character in his best selling novel about Washington, Thank You for Smoking, calling her "a force of nature". She was recently featured in a September 2011 Women’s Wear Daily profile piece called "Capitol Skill". Politico named her one of Washington’s "50 People to Watch" and one of the "25 People You Should Know" in Washington.

Haddad began her career in Pittsburgh at KDKA-TV and radio. She moved to Washington, DC to produce the Larry King Radio Show and then switched to CNN to launch Larry King Live, leading the show to big ratings and even bigger headlines.

Haddad hosts one of Washington's hottest parties of the year during the White House Correspondents Weekend that is used as a platform for two causes she supports, the Global Maternal Health Campaign/The White Ribbon Alliance for Safe Motherhood and CURE Epilepsy. She is a member of the International Women’s Forum and is on the board of the Miss America Organization. Haddad is the recipient of two John Foster Peabody Awards, Cable Ace Awards, the Gracie Award for best news producer in 2007, and the 2010 Friend of CURE Award. Haddad lives in Washington, D.C. with her two children and her husband Ted Greenberg, a former prosecutor and World Bank veteran.

Marc Heyneker

Marc Heyneker is a co-founder of Revinate the leading provider of online reputation and social media management solutions specialized for the hospitality industry, where he currently oversees global sales, account management, business development and channels.

Prior to Revinate, Marc spent over 9 years as a top sales and channels executive at Akamai Technologies, the global leader for Internet content delivery and web application acceleration services. Marc managed the High Tech sales division nationally, and received individual awards for top sales executive performance in the US in 2005, as well as top sales executive performance globally in 2006. Marc graduated from Vanderbilt University with degrees in Economics and Psychology.

John Kao

Dubbed “Mr. Creativity” by The Economist, John calls himself an innovation activist.  He is chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation, whose i20 group is an association of 30 national ‘Chief Innovation Officers.’  John coined the term “large scale innovation” to refer to innovation as a societal agenda.  He has advised numerous nations and regions on innovation strategy and execution, including Finland, Singapore, the City of San Francisco, Abu Dhabi and elements of the US government as well as the European Union innovation policy team.

John is a leader in creating and delivering high end innovation leadership executive programs for both public and private sectors.  He was a member of the Harvard Business School faculty from 1982-96, where he created executive and MBA programs on innovation. He wrote Jamming: The Art and Discipline of Business Creativity, a BusinessWeek best-seller, and Innovation Nation, published in October, 2007 about America’s growing innovation challenge.

Currently John serves as director of the Bay Area Science and Innovation Consortium, founding member of Cisco System’s Innovation Commission, and chairman of the Global Advisory Council on Innovation of the World Economic Forum.  He is contributing editor to The Daily Beast’s innovation channel.  He is also a director of TwoFour54 a Mubadala company and Phylotech, a company that bridges cleantech and life sciences.

John has long been an angel investor in emerging technology companies and a Tony-nominated producer of film (sex, lies and videotape, Mr. Baseball) and stage (Golden Child, Flower Drum Song).  He is a graduate of Yale College (philosophy), Yale Medical School (psychiatry) and Harvard Business School (management).  A jazz pianist at heart, he apprenticed to rock legend Frank Zappa in 1969.

Chris Lehane

Christopher Lehane, a partner in the California-based company Fabiani & Lehane, has since 2001 provided strategic advice and tactical execution to corporate, entertainment, political and professional sports clients facing complex financial, communications, government affairs, electoral and legal challenges.

In the 1990s, Lehane served in various positions in the Clinton-Gore Administration. From 1998-2000, he was the Press Secretary for former Vice President Al Gore both at the White House and on the 2000 presidential campaign. From 1995 through 1997, Lehane was Special Assistant Counsel to President Bill Clinton, providing legal, communications and political counsel to the President and First Lady of the United States. In 1997, Lehane was Counselor to Housing and Urban Development Secretary Andrew Cuomo where he was involved with various economic and community development projects.

Lehane graduated from Harvard Law School in 1994 and from Amherst College in 1990. Lehane serves on numerous advisory boards, including the Board of Trustees of Amherst College, Common Sense Media and San Francisco’s ChinaSF Committee.

Currently, Lehane is the co-writer and co-producer of the film Knife Fight, a political thriller scheduled for release in 2012 that stars Rob Lowe as a fixer dealing with a series of "October surprises" and which explores the relationship between whether the ends of electing noble people justify the means it takes to get elected. Lehane lives in San Francisco with his wife, Andrea, and two sons, Dominic and Quincy.

Terry Nelson

Terry Nelson has consistently demonstrated high levels of success in both the strategic and tactical areas of campaigns. He has played a senior role in the last four elections and was named one of "Politics Fabulous Fifty" -- a listing of the fifty most influential political operatives in Washington.

Nelson has worked in the last three presidential campaigns and been a general and media consultant on numerous House, Senate and Gubernatorial campaigns around the country.   Since 2010, he has been the Senior Advisor to the National Republican Senate Committee.

Terry also has a long history in public affairs.  He has conducted national campaigns on behalf of the Consumer Healthcare Products Association, Wal-Mart, the American Chemistry Council and Pfizer.  He has also worked with the US Chamber of Commerce, Disney, Fox Entertainment, AARP, the National Association of Manufacturers, AT&T and InBev.

Terry served as the National Political Director for Bush-Cheney 2004 where he was responsible for directing the messaging for the mail and phone program, grassroots organization, turning out the vote, and coalition outreach. This effort produced a historic increase in turnout for President Bush.

Terry graduated from the University of Iowa. He lives in Falls Church, Virginia with his wife, Marci, and their three children.

Steve Schmidt

Steve Schmidt is a strategic counselor to business leaders and major corporations across the U.S. and global economy. Recognized as one of the top public affairs and political strategists in the country, he has been described as a "damage-control master.”

Steve served as a senior advisor to Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign and before that, as Campaign Manager for the re-election of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2006. Schwarzenegger's landslide victory was described by The New York Times as "particularly remarkable given that the Governor appeared to be all but finished just six months ago." The Los Angeles Times commended Steve as having "ran a nearly flawless campaign" and overseen a re-election that "ran against a political tide that swamped other Republicans across the nation.”

Before the Schwarzenegger campaign, Steve served as a member of the White House senior staff as Deputy Assistant to the President and Counselor to the Vice President. In that position, he advised on a wide range of issues and worked at the intersection of public communications, policy development, legislative advocacy and political strategy. During his tenure at the White House, Steve directed strategic communications for the nomination of Chief Justice Roberts and led the nomination team for Justice Alito.

Steve served as one of the top strategists on President Bush's 2004 re-election and was a member of the senior strategic planning group that directed the campaign. He was responsible for directing and implementing the campaign's daily tactical and strategic communications effort, overseeing rapid response, regional media, research, Internet, and television and radio operations.

Before that, Steve worked on Capitol Hill as the Communications Director for the National Republican Congressional Committee where he served as chief communications and media strategist for the U.S. House of Representatives Republican majority during the historic 2002 midterm elections.

Greg Strimple

Greg Strimple offers a unique combination of expertise in public opinion and consumer behavior, award-winning work in advertising, and extensive knowledge of regulated industries, the political process and public policymaking. Greg has leveraged his research, analytical and communications skills to devise and execute successful public policy and marketing campaigns for some of the country's leading corporations and institutions, including AT&T, GE, University of Phoenix, AARP, and the National Football League.

Prior to starting GSSG, Greg was a founding partner of Mercury Public Affairs, a national public affairs consultancy that was acquired by The Omnicom Group. At Mercury, Greg was the firm’s senior strategist overseeing polling and advertising. He was personally involved in many of the firm’s most critical accounts, and has extensive experience in healthcare, energy, entertainment and telecommunications issues. In particular, Greg has extensive experience in cable and satellite carriage issues.

Greg has held numerous positions in presidential, congressional and state legislative campaigns across the country, including as the senior advisor for polling and advertising in Senator John McCain’s 2008 presidential bid. More recently, Greg had a similar role with New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in his upset victory of 2009, and Senator Mark Kirk’s successful campaign in 2010.

Over the span of his career, Greg personally has conducted and interpreted the results of hundreds of local, state, national and international public opinion surveys for campaigns, corporations, NGO’s and business coalitions.

Greg currently resides in Boise, ID, with his wife, Kari, and four children.

Ace Smith

Ace is a 30-year veteran of state and national politics and has directed winning campaigns from district attorney to president. With deep experience on the West Coast, he specializes in high-stakes political, governmental and public affairs campaigns.

Over the years, Ace has worked with a roster of clients including Virginia Governor Doug Wilder (1989), Chicago Mayor Richard Daley (1989), U.S. Senator Paul Simon (1990), Texas Governor Ann Richards (1990), U.S. Senator Patti Murray (1992), U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (1992), U.S. Senator Kent Conrad (1994), Congressman Richard Gephardt (1994-2002), California Governor Gray Davis (1998, 2002), U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (1992-2010) and Howard Deanfor President (2004).

In 2005, Ace directed Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's underdog campaign for Mayor of Los Angeles, marking the first time since the 1930's that an LA Mayor had been defeated after a single term. In 2006, he ran Jerry Brown's campaign for California Attorney General and during the 2008 Democratic Presidential Primary, served as State Director for Senator Hillary Clinton's campaigns in California, Texas and North Carolina. In 2010, Ace and his partners were instrumental in this historic election of San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris as California Attorney General and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom as California Lieutenant Governor.

Ace also has extensive experience advising corporate clients and winning complex initiative campaigns. The subject of several newspaper profiles, Ace was called "legendary" by the New York Times and political campaign manager "heavyweight champion of the year" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Noshir Contractor

Noshir Contractor is the Jane S. & William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences in the School of Engineering, School of Communication and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, USA. He is the Director of the Science of Networks in Communities (SONIC) Research Group at Northwestern University.

He is investigating factors that lead to the formation, maintenance, and dissolution of dynamically linked social and knowledge networks in communities. Specifically, his research team is developing and testing theories and methods of network science to map, understand and enable more effective networks in a wide variety of contexts including communities of practice in business, science and engineering communities, disaster response teams, public health networks, digital media and learning networks, and in virtual worlds, such as Second Life. His research program has been funded continuously for the past 18 years by major grants from the U.S. National Science Foundation with additional funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), Air Force Research Lab, Army Research Institute, Army Research Laboratory, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation as well as the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

Professor Contractor has published or presented over 250 research papers dealing with communicating and organizing. His book titled Theories of Communication Networks (co-authored with Professor Peter Monge and published by Oxford University Press in English and published by Renmin University Press in simplified Chinese in 2010) received the 2003 Book of the Year award from the Organizational Communication Division of the National Communication Association. He is the lead developer of C-IKNOW (Cyberinfrastructure for Inquiring Knowledge Network On the Web) a network recommender system to enable communities using cyberinfrastructure, as well as Blanche, a software environment to simulate the dynamics of social networks.

His papers have received Top Paper awards from the International Communication Association and the National Communication Association. In 2000 he was awarded the Outstanding Member Award by the Organizational Communication Division of the International Communication Association. He has served on the editorial boards of Human Communication Research, Journal of Applied Communication Research, Journal of Communication, Management Communication Quarterly, Organization Science, and the World Wide Web Electronic Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

He has consulted with Procter & Gamble, Livestrong Foundation, Boeing, Charles Schwab, Fiat, Illinois Power, Merrill Lynch, Paramount Pictures, and Vodafone. He developed one of the first graduate and undergraduate “virtual” courses on "Emerging Technologies in the Workplace" that were webcast and cablecast by Jones International University. Internationally, Professor Contractor has also conducted workshops on social network analysis and the management of knowledge networks in China, Finland, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Netherlands, Spain, Thailand, and the United Kingdom.

His other appointments include Chairman of Syndio Social, an organizational network analytics firm based in Chicago, Trustee of the Web Science Trust based in the UK, and an honorary professor at the School of Management at Fudan University in Shanghai. Professor Contractor holds a Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California and a Bachelor’s Degree in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras (Chennai). He was on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for twenty years prior to joining Northwestern in 2007.