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 decades of experience in a variety of fields including mobile computing dating back to the Palm. Meet the founding members of our team.
Joe Falcone, CEO & 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 (and currently sits on the board of the Stanford Coastside Club). 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. Joe resides in Half Moon Bay in a solar-powered house with an outdoor Siberian forest cat named Scrappy.
Kon Lovett, CTO
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.
Dan Blick, Database Analyst
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.
Julie Thomas, Community Advisor
Julie has been working on environmental issues in the San Luis Obispo County area for many years. A California native, she lived in Cayucos and Morro Bay throughout her teen years before attending the University of California at Berkeley for a BA in Comparative Literature and BS in Soil Resource Management, then obtaining an MS in Soil Science from the University of California at Davis. Julie returned to SLO County in 1997 as senior staff scientist at the Camp Roberts environmental office. From 2004-2011, Julie served as Watershed Coordinator for the Coastal San Luis Resource Conservation District (RCD) based in Morro Bay, responsible for funding, permitting and overseeing implementation of soil, water and stream conservation and restoration projects on private agricultural and range lands, as well as on natural resource preserves, throughout coastal San Luis Obispo County. While with the RCD, Julie worked in coordination with numerous farmers and ranchers, partner organizations, agencies and municipalities in order to successfully complete projects. Julie and her husband love to spend time kayaking on Morro Bay, scuba dive whenever possible (this past year memorably in Big Sur and Baja), and are learning to sail their 1961 O’day daysailer as members of the Morro Bay Yacht Club. Julie lives in Morro Bay and currently works as an independent environmental consultant.