Keith McAllister
Chief Executive Officer
Keith McAllister is an award-winning media executive whose career accomplishments range from investigative journalism to overseeing the largest electronic newsgathering organization in the United States. Until late 2003, Mr. McAllister had spent almost 18 years at CNN. In his last role, he was CNN's executive vice president and managing editor of national newsgathering, a division with 500 staff that provided news coverage, programming, and other content to CNN's TV, radio, web, and wireless outlets. Mr. McAllister directed all news coverage, as well as nine bureaus, five beats (Political, Medical, Science, Travel, and Entertainment), and newsgathering relationships with CNN's 700 affiliated local stations and networks. In the period between CNN and Mochila, he consulted with clients on media and branding strategy, crisis management, and content development strategies.
During Mr. McAllister's tenure in charge of domestic newsgathering, CNN US's ratings improved and the network solidified its lead in total audience among news networks. CNN also enhanced its status as the industry's leader in breaking and quality news coverage as shown by the many awards won by Mr. McAllister's division and its various units. Those include the following: Emmy Award, National Headliner Award, Edward R. Murrow Award, Peabody Award, Overseas Press Club Award, and Royal Television Society Award.
Prior to becoming a senior executive, Mr. McAllister's other roles at CNN included vice president and New York bureau chief, New York managing editor, field producer, assignment editor, writer, and production assistant. Mr. McAllister received a B.A. from Amherst College and lives in Brooklyn with his wife and three sons.
Benjamin Chen
Chairman and Chief Technology Officer
Benjamin Chen is a 20-year veteran of high tech startups. Prior to Mochila, Mr. Chen was a founder of AppGenesys, a leading managed services web hosting provider for Fortune 500 clients, partnered with Intel, Softbank, JP Morgan, where he was Chairman, CEO and CTO.
Previously, Mr. Chen was the CIO and CTO at iXL, a strategic e-business consulting firm. At iXL, he helped grow the company from 100 to 3,000 employees worldwide and from $2M to $120M revenue per quarter. During Mr. Chen's tenure, iXL was known for delivering innovative technology solutions to the F500, included a $50M contract with Delta Airlines and $100M contract with General Electric. Other key customers included AT&T, CheapTickets.com, FEDEX, Sony (AiBO Launch), Tickets.com, and WebMD. Mr. Chen was part of the executive management team that helped take iXL public in 1999.
Prior to iXL, Mr. Chen worked at CBS Studio Center, as a technologist working on some of the first convergence of prime time television content and the internet. Mr. Chen also produced the 1996 Emmy Awards Cybercast, demonstrating the world’s largest number of internet video streams that year. Mr. Chen has also served on the advisory/boards of Teralytics and Exodus/Digital Island, a Cable and Wireless Company. He received a B.S. in international finance from the University of Southern California and is an avid martial artist with a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do.
Carolyn Bekkedahl
Chief Development Officer
Carolyn Bekkedahl's experience in consumer magazine publishing and advertising sales spans 17 years. During her career, she has managed the sales and marketing operations for more than 15 magazines in a variety of categories. Most recently, Ms. Bekkedahl was President of the Entertainment and Active Lifestyle Magazine Groups at American Media Inc. with responsibility for ten magazines. Highlights of her tenure at AMI include the successful re-launch of Star Magazine which resulted in a 50% increase in advertising revenue. In addition, she drove unprecedented revenue and EBITDA growth at Shape Magazine, leading to its inclusion on Adweek's Hot List for three consecutive years.
Prior to that, she held successive management positions at Hachette Filipacchi Magazines. Ms. Bekkedahl has been active in major magazine and advertising trade organizations, including Advertising Women of New York, Magazine Publishers of America, Cosmetic Executive Women and the Consumer Health and Pharmaceuticals Association.
Ms. Bekkedahl holds a BA from The College of William & Mary, and lives in lower Manhattan with her husband, Michael and daughter, Julia
Jason Oliver
VP Professional Services
Prior to founding Mochila, Mr. Oliver held the roles of CIO, CTO and EVP of AppGenesys, a leading Managed Services Provider servicing Fortune 500 clients.
Prior to AppGenesys he served as Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Technology of etown.com, the leading consumer electronics data services company powering BestBuy.com, Yahoo!, Lycos and others. Before joining etown.com, Mr. Oliver was Chief Technology Officer at Novo Group (now Semaphore Partners, a Publicis SA company), where he guided the technology visions of customers such as Toyota, e*trade, Motorola and MediaOne to create digital commerce Internet solutions.
Mr. Oliver previously co-founded Ironlight Digital in 1995, one of the first full-service Internet services companies. As managing principal, he developed the strategies, designs, engineering and hosting solutions for companies such as Sony, Lotus, Disney Channel and the Emmy Awards and led the technology vertical including ISP operations. Prior to founding Ironlight Digital, he was President and founder of General Internet, Inc., the first corporate ISP to provide co-location services in Los Angeles. Mr. Oliver is a board member of Corgus Inc. and participates as an advisor for Lionshares.com/Worldly Investor, and Collaborative Media Inc. He attended Woodbury University and University of Southern California.
Bill Lindsey
VP Architecture
Bill Lindsey has over 20 years of software development experience, including over 10 years designing commercial print and web publishing systems for companies such as Reed Elsevier and ITT, where he developed software that produces legal reference books and yellow page directories.
From 1996 to 1998, Mr. Lindsey was a systems architect for TRW, where he developed an Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) solution for AT&T Broadband's customer care organization. Most recently, as chief architect at B-Bop Associates, he led the design of one of the first native XML databases, inventing patent-applied techniques for indexing XML content with relational database technology.
Mr. Lindsey was an invited expert in the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) "SGML on the Web" activity where he participated in the design of XML and served on the XSLT working group in designing XML's transformation language. He is the maintainer of the Java XSLT engine, the open source "XT," and is the lead developer of the open source XML processing engine, XMLECHO. He studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute.
