Sean Morgan - Founder & Chief Executive Officer

Mr. Morgan was a founding team member and SVP of Sales at Pinnacor, Inc [NASDAQ: PCOR, formerly ScreamingMedia], a leading provider of information management solutions for the aggregation, distribution and integration of real time business and financial information into websites, intranets, wireless sites and interactive television. Pinnacor was recently sold to Marketwatch, Inc. [NASDAQ: MKTW] for over $100 million. As one of the founders of Pinnacor, Mr. Morgan was responsible for building a 60-person sales and business development organization, and grew monthly revenue from $15,000 to $1.8 million in under 24 months. Mr. Morgan represented the company in front of industry analysts and investors, and helped raise more than $95 million in various funding rounds. Pinnacor debuted on the NASDAQ in August 2000.

Dave Armon - President

Mr. Armon honed his public relations and communication expertise during his 20-year tenure at PRNewswire, where he served as both president and COO. While there, Armon led the company's transition into one of the leading digital public relations services and helped the company successfully expand into Europe, Latin America and Asia. Armon was also heavily involved in the acquisition of numerous companies including ProfNet, eWatch, Chicago's PR News Service, U.S. Newswire and Hispanic PR Wire. After leaving PRN, Mr. Armon served as a non-executive director of the social media monitoring firm Techrigy, which was acquired by Alterian in 2009; the PR software supplier dna13, which sold to CNW Group in 2010; and VC-backed press release aggregator Noodls. Additionally, Armon has held advisory roles at Glide Technologies, PitchEngine, PeekYou and NASDAQ OMX.

Tom Gilley - Chief Technology Officer

Mr. Gilley was most recently a technology strategist with Compass Advisers, a boutique investment bank, where he led the Communications, Media and Entertainment practice with strategic advisory roles in mergers, acquisitions and investments for large public companies and private equity firms in the areas of security systems, enterprise software, media, mobile and wireless. He was the founder of Vidavee, an on-demand web media company, which was eventually sold to Vignette (NASDAQ: VIGN) in 2008. He stayed on with Vignette as CTO and led the integration of Vidavee’s platform into the Vignette enterprise content and social media product line while contributing to the company’s overall enterprise software strategy.

Earlier in his career Mr. Gilley gained corporate product management experience at Apple Computer where he worked as an R&D manager in the Advance Technology Group, for which he successfully managed a critical intellectual property portfolio and launched high-tech products and companies for handheld computers, set-top boxes, media systems, digital cameras and social computing. Mr. Gilley transferred from R&D management to Apple portable product management to lead new product development. A lifelong entrepreneur and inventor, Mr. Gilley founded several successful companies including Meeting Technologies, a social computing company; FutureTel, the first MPEG video broadcast equipment company; and PicoStar, an incubator and technology investment company. At PicoStar, Mr. Gilley was the founding CTO for Cobalt Networks which was subsequently sold to Sun Microsystems.

Rey Contreras - Chief Financial Officer

Mr. Contreras joins Critical Mention from Pennell Venture Partners, where he was responsible for internal operations, screening new business opportunities and structuring new financings. Mr. Contreras led the firm's investment in Critical Mention and worked closely with the management team for over a year before joining. Previously, Mr. Contreras was Senior Associate - Project Development for Poseidon Resources, a private developer and financier of large-scale infrastructure projects. Mr. Contreras has a BA in Economics/Operations Research from Columbia University.

Michael Bermann - Senior Vice President/General Counsel

Mr. Bermann rejoined the team as General Counsel of Critical Media in 2008. Mr. Bermann had previously worked with Critical Mention crafting our first user agreements and diligently negotiating our first content partner relationships. Prior to joining Critical Mention in 2002, Mr. Bermann started out his legal career in private practice with the national law firm of Mintzer, Sarowitz, Zeris, Ledva and Meyers, P.A in Miami, Florida. Upon returning to Florida in 2004, Michael was a senior associate and head of the litigation team at Silver, Levy, Feldman & Bass, P.A. in Tampa, Florida. Mr. Bermann received his Juris Doctorate from Nova Southeastern University Law School in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, and received a dual degree in Political Science and Philosophy from Syracuse University in New York.

Steve Shannon - Vice President, Sales & Marketing

Mr. Shannon was with BurrellesLuce for 17 years and most recently served as Executive Vice President overseeing sales, service, marketing and product development. He began as an account executive and regional sales manager with the company and is credited with more than doubling sales of the Media Contacts service. In the product development arena, Mr. Shannon conceived and led the launch of the BurrellesLuce web portal, resulting in a clip revenue increase of 32 percent. He also designed and implemented the iMonitor service, launched in October 2008, and led his team to more than 600 sales of the service in its first 12 months. He is also credited with growing the Media Measurement unit by 10 percent.

Andrew Koeck - Vice President, Business Development & Channel Partners

For more than 15 years Mr. Koeck has helped technology and service companies achieve stronger revenue streams and improved market share. He has successfully managed corporate turnarounds, mergers and the go-to-market strategies for several new technology hardware and software products. He previously served as the President and VP Partnerships at dna13 Inc., a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company and a leader of on-demand software for real-time reputation management; President of Intermate International, a premier U.S. supplier of IBM printing solutions including electronic forms to the industry's leading manufacturers; and VP of Sales and Marketing at LCI SMARTpen, a Belgium-based company and award-winning developer of biometric security products.

John Utley  - Executive Vice President,  Program Manager

John Utley is Executive Vice President, Program Manager and a member of Critical Media’s management team.  He is responsible for revenue growth and high end-user satisfaction resulting from the successful development and deployment of the company’s products and infrastructure.

John came to Critical Media from Civolution where he was Vice President of Product Management for Teletrax, the global broadcast intelligence service.  For ten years, he oversaw multiple research and development projects including monitoring network upgrades, core technology improvements and development of new data reporting and visualization tools.  Teletrax global broadcast monitoring solutions employ watermarking and fingerprinting technologies to monitor the use of client content in the advertising, news, entertainment, rights management, corporate television, sports and government sectors.  During his tenure with Civolution, he also served as Chairman of the Digital Watermarking Alliance.  

Prior to joining Teletrax, John was Senior Launch Project Manager with Internet Broadcasting Systems where he successfully managed the design, staffing and launch of multiple broadcast journalism websites.  John counseled several traditional media companies in creating new online business models as Senior New Media Consultant at Frank N. Magid Associates.  He gained television journalism and technical experience during six years with NBC.

John holds dual Bachelor’s degrees in Economics and Radio, TV & Film from the University of Maryland as well as an MBA with specializations in strategy and information systems from the University of Minnesota.