Our Management Team:
Steve Hoffman is the CEO & lead designer at LavaMind. He's also a founding member of the Academy of Television's Interactive Media Group and the founder of the San Francisco Chapter of the Producers Guild. Most recently, he led development on a location-based mobile & social platform for Qualcomm. Before this, he developed RocketOn, a parallel virtual world, and Blerp a social media website.
Prior to this, Hoffman was the COO and cofounder of Tap11, an intelligent Twitter client that provides businesses with the best analytic and CRM tools. Before that, Hoffman was the North American Studio Head for Infospace, where he ran the North American mobile games publishing & development group. From 1998 - 2002, he was the Chairman & CEO of Spiderdance, Hollywood's leading interactive television studio, whose customers included NBC, Viacom, Time Warner, TBS, GSN and A&E. He also consulted for R/GA Interactive, designing projects for Kodak, Disney, Intel, AdAge, and Children's Television Workshop.
In Japan, he worked as a game designer for Sega, generating new concepts and designs for games and amusement rides. Prior to Sega, he was a Hollywood development executive at Fries Entertainment, where he managed TV development. He graduated from the University of California with a BS in Electrical Computer Engineering and went on to earn a Masters in Film & Television from USC. He is also the co-author of "Game Design Workshop" published by CMP in 2004.
Naomi Kokubo is the creative & art director at LavaMind. She has worked on all of our recent projects, as project manager and creative director, including our Qualcomm project, RocketOn virtual world, and Blerp social site.
Prior to this, she was Development Director at Electronic Arts. From 1998 - 2002, she was COO and acting CFO of Spiderdance, Hollywood's leading interactive television studio, whose customers included NBC, Viacom, Time Warner, TBS, GSN and A&E.
Kokubo began here career at Morgan Stanley's Tokyo Branch as a Financial Analyst. Kokubo has also worked in the film business, coordinating an international film co-production for NHK of Japan and Grundy Company of Australia. Kokubo is a graduate of ICU in Tokyo, Japan. She also has a passion for manga and anime, and has translated dozens of Japanese comic books and animations.
Brian Wheeler is our chief technical brain. He handles all communications between our clients and our engineering team. He also is the lead technical architect on many of our projects. Brian is an expert in both game development and enterprise system architecture, with over twelve years experience in Java, Groovy, Ruby, Flash, iPhone & Microsoft technologies. Most recently, he was the lead engineer on our Qualcomm project, as well as on RocketOn and Blerp.
Brian has also done extensive enterprise work. He is the creator of the modTrak system, a web-based ASP for tracking loan and loan modification applications. He also designed and developed the Queue workflow application. Queue is a custom enterprise java based application built to track medical billing through over 20 workflow stages spanning processing centers in the US and india.
Before Queue, Brian designed and developed the data register for transmission grid assets. The TR project consists of an internal and external tapestry web application used by ISO employees and external grid operators. The application layer is a J2EE solution running on JBoss and Oracle. It is used to maintain real-time accounting of all transmission grid assets for the state of California. Brian designed and developed a custom stock research application, using a Swing client and a Groovy on Grails web client, MySql database, and J2EE server application running in JBOSS. Before that, Brian was the lead user interface engineer for Compassoft's Enterprise product (CE).
