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Virgil Bistriceanu joined Centro as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) in April of 2006 after 6 years as CTO of MyPoints.com, followed by more than 4 years in senior technology leadership positions at United Airlines and its subsidiaries. He was a co-founder and CTO of of MotivationNet, which later merged with Intellipost to form MyPoints.com, a company that went public successfully in 1999. While at MyPoints.com, he constructed, managed, and motivated a team of smart, independent, innovative and eager-to-learn loyal professionals who have a true sense of ownership of the products they create and support. As testament to this, many of them have joined his team at Centro.Mr. Bistriceanu's team at MyPoints.com consisted of up to 75 professionals within the Development, Quality Assurance, Databases, and IT Operations departments. He managed a yearly technology budget of up to $25 million. Virgil's team successfully deployed three major releases of the MyPoints.com application and web site, together with three international implementations (Sweden, UK, and Japan).At United Airlines Virgil managed, among other things, software development for united.com and software development and QA for United's next generation Internet Booking Engine; he worked closely with various business units to define, implement, and successfully run a release-based software delivery process that optimally used shared available resources, ensured predictability in application delivery and addressed business needs based on clear financial and strategic objectives. Virgil set standards and implemented processes to improve the overall quality of applications delivered such as automated unit-testing, test-driven development, mandatory functional, load and stress testing, etc.Virgil is a true believer in agile software development and a big supporter of free and open-source software (F/OSS). His software development team at Centro practices Extreme Programming (two-week iterations, test-driven and pair programming, etc.) The team develops using Linux, Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Mongrel, and Apache and focuses heavily on interaction design and usability, building interfaces using web standards (XHTML, CSS, and Javascript) and rich interactions with Ajax.Virgil joined Centro for two main reasons (i) the company’s Manifesto which outlines a different way of defining corporate success in America with emphasis on employees instead of money and (ii) the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to be part of revolution, a fundamental change in the way advertisers, big and small, interact with local media and the tidal shift of advertising dollars from national to local.Since 1993, Mr. Bistriceanu has been an Instructor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, where he has been teaching undergraduate and graduate classes for the Computer Science and the Electrical Engineering Departments, ranging from 500 level Computer Architecture courses for graduate students, to 400 and 300 level Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Information Security, Object-Oriented Design and Programming, Logic Design and Implementation and Discrete Mathematics courses for undergraduate students.Mr. Bistriceanu holds his MS in Electrical Engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Bucharest, Romania. He has conducted research in performance analysis for parallel programming languages, with emphasis on Message Driven Computation as part of his Ph.D. study in Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology.The Illinois I.T. Association awarded Mr. Bistriceanu the Spotlight Award, which is given to the CIO/CTO for leadership and outstanding contributions in the application of information technology. | 