Mark Buckland, CTO
Mark grew up with the conference industry in his blood. His father, Leslie, was one of the pioneers of slide-tape multi-projector audio visual presentations and built Caribiner Inc, one of the most successful conference production agencies that dominated the large corporate events market for almost 20 years. During this time Mark learnt his technical trade, working for Caribiner and freelance for many other agencies. He developed his skills as an AV programmer to ‘rock-star’ status among his peers. Even then he was constantly looking for ways to go beyond the obvious, to use the equipment and software in ever more innovative ways that would help achieve the end objective of creative and effective communication. This led him into working with emerging computer graphic technology and also video.
In 2001 it was this same entrepreneurial drive that led him to form Digital Proceedings, a specialist conference recording service that once again stretched the available technology to fit a communications need. Mark has always believed that all meetings, whatever their scale, have content of value that largely falls by the wayside after the event. There were few effective and even fewer affordable ways to capture that content and make it available to a global audience, so as Mark built a business recording medical seminars he carefully pulled together the elements that led to the birth of BeThere Global in 2009.
Martin Shepherdly, CEO
Martin left art college with qualifications in graphics and advertising. However, he very quickly fell into the conference production world by taking some freelance work designing audio-visual programs for a large incentive company. He soon decided that the corporate events world was more fun than advertising could ever be and before long was designing and producing large scale conferences and product launches for major global brands.
It was around this time that Martin first met and worked with Mark Buckland working on the launch of a new truck for a now defunct British commercial vehicle manufacturer. Like Mark, Martin has always searched for different and better ways to communicate with an audience and in 1992 the pair worked together again and developed the first presentation in Europe to use three video projectors blended together to form an ultra wide screen. Synchronized graphics and video imagery was spread across the screen played out from there synchronized laser disc players. The result was an immensely engaging and powerful presentation and was a precursor to the sophisticated large scale video presentation technologies of today.
In 2005 Martin established Web-Epics Video Marketing to serve the rapidly growing streaming video market, working with both corporate and SMB clients. When Mark approached him to get involved with BeThere Global, it made perfect sense as the concept sits fair and square across the two worlds of video and presentations production that Martin knows so well.
Richard Little, Chairman
Richard is a UK-based non-executive director of various software and services businesses in Europe and North America. Richard has 25 years experience in the software industry, 20 years in messaging and middleware, 15 years specializing in financial services applications.
As founder and chief executive of Braid, he grew the business to $25 million revenues and sold it to Mercator (NASDAQ: MCTR) in 1999. Richard is particularly interested and experienced in meeting the challenges of growing or combining technology businesses to get from founder-managed stage with £5-10 million in revenues to publicly-owned companies with £50-100 million in revenues. Richard is also a member of the Investment Advisory Committee of UK-based IQ Capital Fund, focusing on investments in seed and early stage technology companies.
Richard holds an MA in English Literature and Oriental Studies from Cambridge University, UK. A former rower and marathon runner, he is also a keen skier.