About Us
Meet The Goombah Staff
Goombah has its roots in Maine, where five music lovers and entrepreneurs banded together around the idea that nothing should come between artist and audience.
Diane Sammer
Diane Sammer, CEO, is responsible for the overall direction of Goombah. Prior to forming Emergent Music LLC, Diane Sammer helped found Systems/Link Corporation and also served as its president and chief executive officer from 1995 until HNC Software acquired the company in 2000. Systems/Link provided the global wireless communications industry with software and networking tools for data collection, fraud control, billing services, switch automation and customer acquisition. Systems/Link was named by "Inc." Magazine to the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies in the U.S. and Diane was featured in "Wireless Week" Magazine as one of 24 "Enterprising Women of Wireless."
Prior to founding Systems/Link, Sammer worked in sales and marketing at Computer Sciences Corporation. She earned her B.A. in psychology with a minor in computer science from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (formerly North Adams State College.) She was later awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws degree by MCLA.
Diane currently serves as a board member of the Small Enterprise Growth Fund, a state-funded venture capital fund. In this capacity, she works with fellow board members to evaluate investment opportunities, make investments in companies that are likely to yield high growth and public benefit, and to provide technical assistance to portfolio companies as needed. Diane also serves on the advisory board of the Maine Small Business Development Center; she's a judge for the University of Southern Maine's Business Plan Competition; and is a partner of Randy Labbe on the Saltwater Music Festival.
Barry Kurland, President
is responsible for Goombah's Business Development, Marketing and Sales, including music, technology and other strategic partnerships. Prior to joining Goombah, Barry worked for two years as an Operating Partner at a Venture Capital firm, where he was in charge of strategy consulting with portfolio companies, participated in deal sourcing, investment decisions, due diligence, and fundraising; served on boards; and helped manage investments.
Barry also worked for over 10 years at Microsoft Corporation. While at Microsoft he launched, grew and managed several rapidly growing and scalable new ventures in emerging markets, which included experience in market and strategic analysis, business planning and execution, product and technology development, sales and marketing, financial analysis and general management. He was part of the core team that developed the business plan and launched Microsoft's MSN Sidewalk, a city entertainment guide, yellow pages, buying guide and shopping service, and was the General Manager responsible for launching Boston Sidewalk prior to Sidewalk being acquired by TicketMaster-Online CitySearch. Barry also developed the business plan for and launched Microsoft's Worldwide Business Desk and Small and Mid-Market Solutions and Partner Group business in New England, and led the Microsoft Technology Center organization. Before Microsoft, Barry held positions in management consulting, technology solutions consulting, marketing and sales, operations, and financial analysis, which included experience in mergers and acquisitions.
Barry has been actively involved in helping national, regional and local community and social service organizations. He led the start-up, initial management and growth of Habitat for Humanity's Cars for Homes program, and the development of the plan to scale it nationally, including the negotiation of national media and strategic partnership agreements. He currently serves on the Technology Advisory Board of Cambridge College in Boston and advises or is on the board of several local community and social service organizations. Barry earned his MBA, and Bachelor of Science of Business Administration degree summa cum laude from the University of Vermont.
Gary Robinson
Gary Robinson, VP of Innovation and CTO, is both a musician and leader in the "recommendation engine" business. Gary and his family moved from New York City all the way north to Bangor, Maine, where it recently hit a bone-chilling 17 below zero last winter. An acoustic guitar player, Gary wrote and performed a song on an album carried by Smithsonian Folkways.
Goombah is the fulfillment of nearly 20 years of refinement of Gary's idea and a technology to support it. After getting his B.A. in Mathematics from Bard College, Gary did some graduate study in Mathematics at the Courrant Institute at NYU before becoming a full-time entrepreneur. In the mid-1980's Gary founded Microvox Systems, Inc., to create a voice mail-based dating service in New York City called 212-ROMANCE. As far as is known, this was the earliest such service, and was one of the earliest voice mail services of any type, and was the first known commercial service to create community-based automated recommendations. As a way of determine whose recorded "personals ad" should be played for whom, Gary implemented an idea now referred to as collaborative filtering. Collaborative filtering is now used for such applications as recommending movies, music, and even Web sites. In hindsight it appears that 212-ROMANCE was the first commercial application to use collaborative filtering.
Gary was recently a Research Director at ActiveState, working on issues in detecting spam (unsolicited commercial email). His research and techniques are now being widely adopted by the anti-spam industry, including such leading filters as SpamAssassin (PC Magazine's Editor's Choice for spam filtering in 2003), SpamSieve (MacWorld's Software of the Year for 2003) and SpamBayes (PC World's Editor's Choice for spam filtering for 2005). These techniques are the subject of a Linux Journal article (March, 2003) written by Gary, and are taught in the new book Ending Spam by Jonathan Zdziarski. He won a National Science Foundation/SBIR award for related research. These techniques are a spin-off of his many years of work on his approach to collaborative filtering; very similar mathematics is now used in the Goombah product.
As VP of Advanced Technology of Athenium, L.L.C, Gary managed the development of TeamThink, a collaborative educational application. He is one of the inventors of the product, which has been used at universities including Stanford, Yale, and Tufts, as well as major corporations. Prior to this, Gary had a long-term consulting contract with New York Telephone (now part of Verizon) where he designed and implemented a number of database systems involving many millions of customer records.
Check out Gary's blog at www.garyrobinson.net
Madeline Mooney
Madeline Mooney, Marketing Advisor. Before joining Goombah, Madeline led marketing teams in both large and small companies including Lycos Inc., where she was the VP of Marketing. While at her post, the Lycos Network user base grew from four million to more than 32 million unique visitors per month and became the fourth most visited Web site on the Internet. Madeline has been featured on radio and broadcast programs including CNN as well as industry conferences. She has also testified before Congress on various Internet topics.
Madeline began her career at Wang and went on to become vice president of marketing and operations at the AThink Group and then head of worldwide marketing for Interleaf. She holds a bachelor's degree from Ithaca College and an MBA from Boston University.
Randy Labbe
Randy Labbe, VP of Industry Relations, has been in the music business all of his adult life. The Clark University graduate has worked in booking and management for blues and roots music performers for most of his career. Randy has produced both live and recorded music, including over 80 international releases that have garnered 10 Grammy Nominations. He has worked with such blues luminaries as Tab Benoit, Rory Block, James Cotton, Maria Muldaur, Charlie Musselwhite, and Jimmy Thackery. He has also worked with artists on side-projects and compilations including Greg Brown, Elvis Costello, Marshall Crenshaw, Lucinda Williams, Graham Parker, and many others. Randy is passionate about music and about getting great music in front of an audience. He is a co-founder of several blues and roots music festivals, most recently the Saltwater Music Festival and the Knock on Wood Guitarfest, both in Maine.
Bob Swerdlow
Bob Swerdlow, Chief Engineer, excels at working with high-energy people and creating new applications that create value for users. Bob has a B.A. and M.S. in Computer Science from Harvard and over twenty-five years experience managing, developing, and delivering awarding-winning products in a wide range of fields. These include a long history with Macintosh software, having won MacWorld Eddy awards for inbox and PhotoMac. Also, Bob's award-winning language software was featured at Apple's PowerPC introduction. Bob has worked on software for natural language translation and one of the first all digital videotape editing systems in various capacitiesófrom a software engineer at Think Technologies to a VP of Software at the Avalon Dev Group. Most recently, Bob had his own consulting firm, which boasts the Greater Portland Chamber of Commerce, Polaroid and the Portland Musuem of Art as clients.
Eric Eaton
Eric Eaton, Creative Director, is steeped in cutting edge Web development. From 1996 - 2001 Eric was a chief developer and designer at Hotwired and Wired Digital, helping to create such pioneering sites as Webmonkey, Wired News and Hotbot. in 2002 he authored Design Whys: Designing Website Interface Elements (Peachpit Press). As principal of Deliberate, Eric has helped an array of organizations with identity design, way finding systems, exhibits and typographic systems. He is an adjunct professor at Maine College of Art, and has curated museum exhibitions. When he can find the time, Eric likes to build traditional, Greenland-style kayaks.