Jed Alpert
Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Jed co-founded and is the Chief Executive Officer of Mobile Commons. He is considered one of the foremost authorities on mobile communications strategy, and he and his work have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Fast Company, MSNBC and many more. He has guest lectured at the Kennedy School of Government and New York University, and has recently been a featured speaker at the Nonick International Conference on Internet Trends, the Nonprofit Technology Conference, the National Conference on Media Reform and more. Additionally, he is a frequent participant in Aspen Institute forums and Ford Foundation events. He is the author of the book The Mobile Marketing Revolution: How Your Brand Can Have a One-to-One Conversation with Everyone.
Jed previously served as the President of Sunshine Amalgamedia where he developed syndication sponsorship models that paired up-and-coming directors with nationally branded sponsorship and multiple distribution networks. Sunshine partners, clients, and customers have included Microsoft, Oracle, and Scripps Howard. Additionally, Jed created marketing and sponsorship programs for clients such as Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears, Pepsi and Samsung.
Prior to joining Sunshine, Jed worked as an attorney, focusing his practice on entertainment and media law. He was a partner at Rudolph and Beer, and an associate at Paul Weiss. Jed has produced numerous feature films including Sunday, winner of the 1997 Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. He is on the board of Eyebeam, the Harmony Institute, Health Foundation for the Americas and National Safe Place. He was previously on the board of Riverkeeper and has advised numerous film, arts and cultural organizations.
Benjamin Stein
Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer
Ben is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobile Commons, where he is responsible for product development, system architecture, and technical operations. He is one of the leading pioneers shaping how organizations successfully use mobile for healthcare, advocacy, fundraising, organizing, and other forms of communication.
Ben has 15 years of experience building Internet applications of all shapes and sizes. He spent much of his career building distributed software for B2B customers. With a background in both the financial and medical industries, he has extensive experience with high-availability systems with a focus on security and data sensitivity. As a software engineer at Bloomberg LP, Ben developed their trading system, search engine, and web services. After Bloomberg, he worked at ShadowTV, transcoding, indexing and streaming hundreds of terabytes of video data for government and corporate customers.
He earned a BS in electrical and biological engineering and a Master’s in medical image processing, both at Cornell University. After completing his studies, he took a position as a Visiting Scientist, developing medical software used in clinical trials for lung cancer screening and image analysis tools used in General Electric’s CT scanners.
Ben lives on a small urban farm in Brooklyn with his wife Arin and sons Gabriel & Ezekiel. He can usually be found coding, biking, or rock climbing. He sits on the board of ioby.org and advises nonprofits on effective uses of technology.
Kewhyun Kelly-Yuoh
Chief Financial Officer
Kew brings over 15 years of financial and operational experience to Mobile Commons. After bouncing around for 6 years on Wall Street in a variety of functions ranging across equity research, trading, fixed income strategies, and derivatives research, he left for the greener pastures of high-technology startups.
Prior to entering the mobile sector, Kew delved into IP-based communications, interactive advertising and marketing, search engine marketing and social networking. At Mobile Commons, he specializes in strategic financial planning and analysis, budgeting and deal flow management; and otherwise intrudes in the Company’s legal and operational affairs and human resources.
Kew holds a bachelors degree in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University.
Michael Sabat
Vice President, Business Development
Michael Sabat is the VP of Business Development for Mobile Commons. He focuses on pursuing new markets and making sure that customers are using Mobile Commons software effectively.
Michael has been working at Mobile Commons for over 3 years. He started as the Community Manager and quickly ascended to Director of Accounts before becoming the VP of Business Development. Michael works directly with some of Mobile Commons’ larger clients including the Obama Campaign, SFpark, the California Department of Public Health, the New York City Department of Mental Health and Hygiene and New York Presbyterian Hospital.
Before joining Mobile Commons Michael worked for a startup focused on creating apps for personal training. He grew up in Ohio and received a Bachelor’s Degree from Miami University. He’s been living in New York for over 5 years. Currently he lives in Harlem and takes the 2/3 to work every morning, but he’s excited to be moving to Williamsburg so that he can check out J/M/Z-to-the-F commute.
Louise Ng
Marketing Manager
Louise joined Mobile Commons in October 2012 and is responsible for all marketing and outbound communication efforts of the company. Her main goal is to implement and execute effective marketing campaigns for strategic growth of the company.
Before joining Mobile Commons Louise ran Internet marketing for a hospitality company where she was in charge of all things digital. In her prior life, she also spent five years as an investment banking analyst and was often found crunching numbers until the wee hours of the night.
Louise is a born and bred New Yorker and received a B.S. from New York University. When she’s not dreaming up ideas for the next marketing campaign, she can often be found baking up a storm in her 20 square foot kitchen.
Sam McKelvie
Head of Mobile Strategy
Sam joined the Mobile Commons team a few months after her big move to New York from Oakland, CA. She loves helping our nonprofit clients fulfill their organizational goals through mobile engagement.
Sam has spent her career working in the nonprofit sector. She’s run grassroots fundraising projects, managed human resources, recruited organizers, done accounts payable and everything in-between. She’s truly a Jill-of-all-(non-profit)-
Sam has her Master’s in Intercultural Communication from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and has presented her research on race at conferences across the U.S. She’s a Salesforce.com wizard, an 80s pop culture junkie, and would be virtually unemployable if Spellcheck didn’t exist.
Gloria Fong
Director of Client Experience
Gloria has been at Mobile Commons since September 2010, and works to support customers and their goals. She trains customers on how to use the platform and how to take their mobile campaigns to the next level. Gloria loves speaking with customers and collaborating with them to find new ways to use technology to achieve their goals.
In her previous life, she worked with non-profits and elementary schools in California. She taught in K-3 classrooms in Los Angeles, and directed an afterschool program for 3rd-5th graders in Oakland Chinatown. Then one day she decided to try something new, packed up her life, and moved to Brooklyn.
Gloria graduated with a B.A. in Sociology from UCLA. She loves watching college football and basketball (go Bruins!) and plays soccer and flag football in her spare time.
Mal McKay
Lead Developer
Mal is Mobile Commons’ lead developer. He’s responsible for making our application super easy for people to use and scaling our backend to keep up when they do.
Mal has spent his career building user-friendly web applications, including tween virtual worlds with Ask.com; making government more accessible with BT Ireland; and making HR less stressful with Arithon Recruitment. His 4 years with Mobile Commons is the longest he’s spent at one company, because of all the amazing clients he gets to help.
Mal has spent so long in Ireland that you can no longer tell where he’s from (Virginia). His hobbies include programming, programming in the park, programming with scientists and being Irish. If he could change one thing about himself, it would be to program less, but he’d probably write a program to do that.
Justin Gutterman
Mobile Industry Manager
Justin Gutterman is the Mobile Industry Manager. He is responsible for handling all industry relationships that connect our clients to phone carriers.
Justin came to Mobile Commons after working with small outdoor advertising agencies, where he helped navigate the myriad of regulations across a changing industry. This experience set him up well for his current role, which is a mixture of regulator and behind-the-scenes fixer. When not laying down the new set of mobile industry laws, or contesting them, Justin enjoys rules-lawyering office game nights and immersing himself in nerd culture.
To complete the disparate nature of his background, Justin has a MFA in painting from the Ringling College of Art. He still loves drawing and painting very tiny things.
Omar Yassin
System Administrator
Omar is Mobile Commons’ System Administrator. He’s responsible for monitoring, maintaining and keeping our servers running.
Prior to working for Mobile Commons, Omar got his start working as Tech Support for various companies. He moved onto becoming a System Administrator at ShadowTV where he deployed video capturing servers across the country. As the Unix Administrator at AutoOne Insurance, he was responsible for maintaining their UNIX/Linux and SAN environment.
Omar hails from Queens, New York where he was born, raised, educated (B.S. in Computer Science from CUNY Queens College), married and started a family. Surprisingly he still lives in Queens and is envious of all of his coworkers who are able to bike into our Brooklyn NY office. During his off-hours you can find him supporting his toddler or his folks with their Netflix technical difficulties.
Dan Benamy
Developer
Dan is responsible for adding features to Mobile Commons’ platform and making it as fast as possible.
Dan has done all kinds of software development, from operating system work at Red Hat and VMware, to web development at NY Public Radio, to robotics research at Carnegie Mellon.
Dan grew up in NYC and has a Master’s in Computer Science from Columbia University. For fun, he plays soccer (badly), rock climbs (badly), plays drums (badly), and builds robots (awesomely).
Stephen Fishbach
Word Nerd
Stephen Fishbach writes marketing, communications, and press materials for Mobile Commons. He also heads up the Mobile Commons blog. Before joining Mobile Commons, Stephen worked as Director of Strategy at Massify.com, where he developed media campaigns for Lions Gate Films, After Dark Films, Epic Records, and more. Prior to his work at Massify, Stephen was Senior Strategist at Big Spaceship, where he oversaw their work on mobile communications and contextual advertising. Stephen’s clients included Ford Motors, The Weinstein Company, and Sony Pictures. Stephen also helped launch mtvU, MTV’s college television channel.
Campaigns Stephen has worked on have won Emmy Awards, a Peabody Award, and numerous Beacon Awards. AdWeek selected the HBO Voyeur campaign, for which Stephen served as strategist, as one of the 10 best digital campaigns of the decade.
Stephen has a BA in English from Yale University. In 2009, he was runner-up on the 18th season of CBS’s Survivor.