Phondini Partners is a privately-held mobile application design, development and consulting firm headquartered in beautiful Half Moon Bay, California, voted the 7th Happiest Beach Town by Coastal Living Magazine. The Phondini team has over 170 years of experience to which for an ordinary start-up would translate into about 50-100 employees. We are no ordinary start-up and what we lack in quantity, we more than make up for with quality. Meet the founding members of our team.
Joe Falcone, CTO & Founder
Joe graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with a BA in Computer Science. He also attended the University of California Education Abroad Program at Westfield College of the University of London. While working at Hewlett-Packard Labs, Joe earned his MS in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University. His industry experience includes stints at Digital Equipment, Data General, Kronos and Borland. He was SVP of Engineering and CTO both at Centura/Gupta and ePocrates, where he led development of the most popular mobile medical application. He is the volunteeer webmaster for local non-profit Coastside Hope and has served in local government. Joe resides in Half Moon Bay with his wife Karri and their guinea pigs Pippa, Versace, and Gucci.
Kon Lovett, Chief Architect
Kon is a long-time Mac user, graduate of the University of San Francisco, and contributor to the Chicken Scheme (it’s a dialect of LISP) open source project. Kon is intrigued with the application of modern software development methods (patterns, components, MVC) to mobile software development, and has developed our Ruby on Rails support infrastructure. He has long experience with project management technology, helping develop several generations of project management systems for Projectronix, Microplanner and Digital Tools. His particular interest is defining, developing, and delivering solutions to meet business requirements. He resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and has an occasional interest in anime.
Barbara Martin, Business Director
Barbara brings 20 years years of experience in M&A, business development, financial planning, and contract negotiations. After graduating from UCSD, she began working in South America on M&A strategy using her bi-lingual skills. Later she worked for Pritchett Rummler-Brache on change management, process improvement and re-engineering for a variety of clients. More recently she worked for the City of San Jose and the GSA on economic development and contract management. For Phondini, Barbara handles business strategy and contracts for what she considers to be the best community-oriented start-up in or near Silicon Valley. She resides in Half Moon Bay.
Dan Blick, Senior Mobile Technologist
Dan comes to Phondini after working for over 20 years as a Mechanical Engineer in the hard disk drive industry. “What I love about this job,” Dan says, “is that I get to come up with ideas that help lots of different people. I feel like a kid in a candy store.” Dan is another Cal undergrad / Stanford grad member of the Phondini team; he played the tuba in the Cal Marching Band, and still enjoys playing in a band. Dan lived in the Peninsula and South Bay before he and his wife moved to the Coastside in 1997. They have two wonderful sons who attend school in Half Moon Bay. Both are working toward their black belt in sarcasm.
Milt Grinberg, Senior Mobile Technologist
Milt has a BS from Bucknell University and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Maryland. Moving west Milt spent 4 years doing research at Stanford University before starting to work in a variety of startup businesses in Silcon Valley. He has worked with IBM, Borland, and Intuit along with a variety of small small startup companies. He also has done a variety of consulting work. He has experience in DB development, web development and application development. He is currently developing in the mobile market as well as doing DB consulting.
Karri Kaiser, Marketing Advisor
Karri brings over 30 years of experience in a variety of industries to provide marketing advice and insights to Phondini. She brings a wealth of experience in non-profits and community service which Phondini has applied to their community application development process. Karri also provides human resources support for Phondini. When not advising Phondini, she is a Medical Social Worker for Mission Hospice & Home Care of San Mateo. She also resides in Half Moon Bay.