Capturing consumer mindshare has become increasingly difficult. It’s a problem even for companies that have nurtured and developed trusted relationships with their customers for years. Breaking through to offer relevant products and services in a timely fashion has become the biggest challenge for every marketing organization.
Traditional methods of communicating with customers – email, online ads – are now failing to generate their former high levels of click and conversion rates. Often, they’ve become a cost burden and an annoyance to their customers rather than a mechanism to generate greater customer loyalty.
The era of “push” marketing is on the wane.
But what if your customers “chose” to come to you and engage with your brand? What if they interacted with your brand daily?
White Sky Connect™ is an engaging consumer application that allows companies to communicate more effectively with their customers. How?
White Sky Connect™ gives consumers a real-time online protection service that provides one-click secure access to all their online accounts, secure credit card storage and protection against keyloggers. The compelling security application is combined with White Sky’s messaging service where partners can integrate additional services and deliver targeted offers to their customers.
Since consumers use this application an average of two times a day, it allows your brand to be top of mind daily and makes your services and offers visible daily. The Dynamic Messaging Service lets you deliver personalized content that customers choose to engage with at their leisure, helping increase your conversion rates dramatically.
Integrating multiple services and products as part of the same daily-use application allows you to retain your customers and to build additional revenue streams.
White Sky Connect, is dedicated to helping our partners connect with their consumers and to helping consumers protect their online information. Browse our press releases below for company updates and to learn more about us.
- August 10, 2011StrikeForce Technologies Embedded as Key Component of White Sky’s Extensible Services Platform™ (ESP)
- August 4, 2011 White Sky Launches Extensible Services Platform™ (ESP) With Comcast as First Customer
- April 26, 2010 Introducing ID Vault For iPhone: Single Tap Login for Online Accounts
- April 21, 2010 Sun National Bank Offers ID Vault to Its Users Free of Charge To Protect Their Identities When They Shop, Bank & Invest Online
- March 18, 2010 White Sky Debuts Online ID Theft Protection on the Go with New Id Vault Portable Edition
- March 3, 2010 Earthlink Offers New Free Identity Protection, Powered by White Sky's ID Vault
- September 22, 2009 White Sky Names Pankaj Srivastava to Post of Senior VP Marketing
- June 10, 2009 ID Vault 5.1 Delivers Fastest, Easiest Consumer Protection Against Online Identity Theft
- January 21, 2009 ID Vault Software from White Sky to Be Pre-Loaded on Lenovo IdeaPad Notebook Computers
- January 21, 2009 ID Vault 4.0 from White Sky Delivers First End-to-End Consumer Online Identity Theft Prevention Solution With Two Factor Authentication
Management
V. David Watkins: CEO & President
David Watkins brings extensive experience as a senior executive and CEO at a number of publicly and privately held technology companies. He served as President and Chief Executive Officer for QSecure, a platform solution for securing credit card transactions where he raised two rounds of venture financing and signed contracts with 2 of the top 3 credit card issuers, and TrueSpectra, Inc., a server-based imaging solutions provider that was acquired in 2004. He was also President and Chief Operating Officer of Talk City/LiveWorld, Inc., a publicly traded, marketing services company where he led the transition from a consumer chat site to a marketing services company with contracts with many of the leading consumer brands including Disney, Time Warner, Microsoft, ABC News and others. At Diamond Multimedia Systems, he was General Manager of the Multimedia Division which recorded annual sales of over $400 million. He co-founded and was President and Chief Executive Officer of RioPort, Inc. (a subsidiary of Diamond Multimedia Systems) the company that created the MP3 category and was the original market leader in 1999. Mr. Watkins served in a number of general management positions at Borland International, Inc. where he was responsible for over $200 million in annual revenue, and as Vice President and General Manager at Symantec, Inc. where he ran their database business growing it to over $75 million in less than 3 years.
David has a B.A. in economics from Connecticut College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Mr. Watkins has served as a member of the board of directors of several publicly and privately held companies.
Jerry Thompson: Founder
Jerry Thompson is the cofounder of White Sky, Inc. and is responsible for all field operations and channel partnerships. Before Founding White Sky, Inc., Jerry was President and CEO of the Vardi Group, a worldwide consumer products company based in New York with facilities in Dallas, Bangkok, Hong Kong and China. During his three-year tenure, Jerry managed the complete restructuring of the company's business, successfully recapitalized the company and turned it from a significant loss to a profit. He then oversaw the sale of a large stake in the company to a group of private investors.
Jerry was Vice President and General Manager of Pinnacle Systems Consumer Products Division with responsibilities for sales, marketing and e-commerce. Under his leadership, sales grew by more than 300% in a four-year period and the company's flagship product line, Studio, became the market leader in revenue and share.
Prior to Pinnacle Systems, Jerry served as Executive Vice President in charge of worldwide sales, product development, marketing, channel marketing and PR, as well as overseeing all export sales from foreign manufacturing locations for Town & Country Corp., a $435 million publicly held company. Under his guidance, Town & Country diversified its channel partner base and ultimately generated 42% of total revenue outside of the U.S. When Jerry joined Town & Country, it was doing just under $60 million in revenue. Jerry oversaw an organization that was spread from its Boston headquarters to Bombay, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Germany and six satellite offices in the U.S.
Jerry's career started at Parker Brothers, a division of General Mills Corporation, where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President of Sales for this manufacturer and marketer of board games, children's toys and video games.
He holds a BS in finance from the University of Texas.
Ira Scharfglass: Senior Vice President, Development
Ira Scharfglass has spent more than 25 years successfully managing organizations engaged in the development and delivery of applications and operating systems, ranging from firmware to complex, highly scalable applications and services. His experience includes responsibility for development, QA, support, professional services, product marketing, tech pubs, business planning, IT and operations. Notable previous experience includes five years at Netscape Communications as Vice President, Development, where he was responsible for electronic commerce products, international operations and applications for the Netcenter Web Portal. He also spent four years at Phoenix Technologies, where he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Worldwide Product Operations, with responsibility for development of all of the company's firmware and applications products, as well as professional services. Prior to White Sky, Ira was Senior Vice President, Engineering, at Sana Security, where he was responsible for development of the award-winning Primary Response product family. Ira holds a BA in computer science from Queens College of the City University of New York.
Pankaj Srivastava: Senior Vice President, Marketing
Pankaj Srivastava has more than 18 years of experience in consumer software, retail and e-commerce. Most recently, he was General Manager at ComplianceOnline.com, a Kleiner Perkins-funded company, where he led 30% year-over-year revenue growth and moved the business unit from loss position to cash positive in 18 months. Prior to that, he was Vice President of Worldwide Customer Acquisition and Retention Marketing at McAfee, Inc., where he helped grow the business to several hundred million in sales in five years across North America, EMEA and APAC regions. He developed the best-in-class SaaS marketing playbook that was deployed across global partners such as Dell and AOL. He designed a world-class subscription management system, which became an industry-leading customer communication and retention platform helping generate more than $200 million in revenues over three years. Prior to McAfee, Pankaj was at BlueLight.com, where he led the development of a national customer loyalty program for Kmart, launched multiple consumer programs and was responsible for more than $20 million in sales. He has held senior management roles at several venture-backed companies, where he helped build new businesses from the ground up.
Pankaj has a BS in mechanical engineering from Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology in India, and holds an MBA from Iowa State University.
Brent Lymer: Vice President, Product Management
Brent Lymer brings more than 12 years of product management experience, including SaaS platform architecture design, web-based and traditional software product definition, product positioning and product localization. Most recently, Brent managed Tier I partner implementations for IdentityTruth as the Senior Director of Partner Implementation, where he assisted engineering with the definition of a secure, partner RESTful API, providing partners personalized identity risk scores direct to their consumer subscribers. Prior to IdentityTruth, he was responsible for both the consumer product management and partner management teams at Trend Micro and McAfee Consumer, where he introduced pragmatic marketing principles to manage more than 100 product releases for more than 50 global partners. Brent also has extensive web development and online marketing experience, having launched a number of successful e-commerce businesses.
Brent holds a BS degree from the University of British Columbia and a certificate in multimedia design from the University of British Columbia and the Emily Carr University of Art and Design. He serves as a director for the Marylou Lymer Memorial Fund, a nonprofit that raises money for breast cancer organizations.
Board of Directors
V. David Watkins: CEO & President
David Watkins brings extensive experience as a senior executive and CEO at a number of publicly and privately held technology companies. He served as President and Chief Executive Officer for QSecure, a platform solution for securing credit card transactions where he raised two rounds of venture financing and signed contracts with 2 of the top 3 credit card issuers, and TrueSpectra, Inc., a server-based imaging solutions provider that was acquired in 2004. He was also President and Chief Operating Officer of Talk City/LiveWorld, Inc., a publicly traded, marketing services company where he led the transition from a consumer chat site to a marketing services company with contracts with many of the leading consumer brands including Disney, Time Warner, Microsoft, ABC News and others. At Diamond Multimedia Systems, he was General Manager of the Multimedia Division which recorded annual sales of over $400 million. He co-founded and was President and Chief Executive Officer of RioPort, Inc. (a subsidiary of Diamond Multimedia Systems) the company that created the MP3 category and was the original market leader in 1999. Mr. Watkins served in a number of general management positions at Borland International, Inc. where he was responsible for over $200 million in annual revenue, and as Vice President and General Manager at Symantec, Inc. where he ran their database business growing it to over $75 million in less than 3 years.
David has a B.A. in economics from Connecticut College and an M.B.A. from the Stanford University's Graduate School of Business. Mr. Watkins has served as a member of the board of directors of several publicly and privately held companies.
Jerry Thompson: Founder
Jerry Thompson is the cofounder of White Sky, Inc. and is responsible for all field operations and channel partnerships. Before Founding White Sky, Inc., Jerry was President and CEO of the Vardi Group, a worldwide consumer products company based in New York with facilities in Dallas, Bangkok, Hong Kong and China. During his three-year tenure, Jerry managed the complete restructuring of the company's business, successfully recapitalized the company and turned it from a significant loss to a profit. He then oversaw the sale of a large stake in the company to a group of private investors.
Jerry was Vice President and General Manager of Pinnacle Systems Consumer Products Division with responsibilities for sales, marketing and e-commerce. Under his leadership, sales grew by more than 300% in a four-year period and the company's flagship product line, Studio, became the market leader in revenue and share.
Prior to Pinnacle Systems, Jerry served as Executive Vice President in charge of worldwide sales, product development, marketing, channel marketing and PR, as well as overseeing all export sales from foreign manufacturing locations for Town & Country Corp., a $435 million publicly held company. Under his guidance, Town & Country diversified its channel partner base and ultimately generated 42% of total revenue outside of the U.S. When Jerry joined Town & Country, it was doing just under $60 million in revenue. Jerry oversaw an organization that was spread from its Boston headquarters to Bombay, Bangkok, Hong Kong, Sao Paolo, Germany and six satellite offices in the U.S.
Jerry's career started at Parker Brothers, a division of General Mills Corporation, where he rose to the position of Senior Vice President of Sales for this manufacturer and marketer of board games, children's toys and video games.
He holds a BS in finance from the University of Texas.
Ajay Chopra: General Partner, Trinity Ventures
Ajay is a General Partner at Trinity Ventures, a top tier Venture Capital firm. Ajay has over 20 years of operating experience at the senior management and board level with start‐ups, private companies and public companies. Based on his experiences, Ajay is passionate about helping entrepreneurs execute their Big Idea. Ajay is also well respected in the valley for his expertise in the digital media space.
Prior to joining Trinity Ventures, Ajay co-founded Pinnacle Systems, a seminal media technology company that pioneered consumer generated media creation. During his tenure at Pinnacle, the company grew from start‐up stage to a global $350M public company, won several Emmy awards and completed over a dozen M&A transactions before being acquired by Avid Technology. Previously, Ajay was with Mindset Corporation, a computer graphics start‐up. Before Mindset, he held various technical and management positions at Atari Corporation, a video games company, and Unisys Corporation, an IT services company.
He is a charter member of The Indus Entrepreneurs, an active group providing support for entrepreneurs and is on the Board of Trustees of the Harker School in San Jose.
Jim Counihan: Prism VentureWorks
Jim joined Prism in 2000 and runs the firm's software & services practice. His focus areas are software as a service and MSP's, on-line exchanges, technology enabled services and technology enabled vertical plays. Jim is a director for Astoria Software, Chosen Security, White Sky, The New Orleans Exchange, Mota and RatePoint. He was formerly on the boards of Softricity, acquired by Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT), GeoTrust, acquired by Verisign (NASDAQ: VRSN), and Silverback Technologies, acquired by Dell (NASDAQ: DELL).
Possessing a unique mix of legal, operational and technical knowledge, Jim complements and extends Prism's entrepreneurial and financial expertise. Jim joined Prism from EPiCON, Inc., where he served as Legal Counsel and Director of Business Operations. A Prism investment, EPiCON was sold to Nortel Networks in September 2000.
He has held positions in Corporate Legal Counsel and Business Operations for Sapient Corporation. He also served as Legal Counsel for the Outsourcing Division of Bell Atlantic Network Integration, which during his tenure, grew into a $300 million business in four years.
A member of the Massachusetts Bar Association, Jim holds a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, a J.D. cum laude from Suffolk University Law School.
Michael Stanfield: CEO, Intersections, Inc.
Michael Stanfield is the Chairman and CEO of Intersections. He co-founded CreditComm, the predecessor to Intersections Inc., in May 1996. Mr. Stanfield joined Loeb Partners Corporation, an affiliate of Loeb Holding Corporation, in November 1993 and served as a Managing Director at the time of his resignation in August 1999. He has been involved in management information services and direct marketing through investments and management since 1982, and has served as a director of CCC Information Services Inc. and BWIA West Indies Airways. Prior to beginning his operational career, Mr. Stanfield was an investment banker with Loeb, Rhoades & Co. and Wertheim & Co. He holds a B.B.A. in Business Administration from Emory University and an M.B.A. from Columbia University.
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