Joshua March, Co-founder & CEO
Josh is an entrepreneur and specialist in the online and social media industry. He's been involved in the social network application space since Facebook first launched their application platform in 2007, and is Chairman of the Facebook Developer Garage London, a monthly non-profit event for social network developers sponsored by Facebook and Sun Microsystems.
Dan Lester, Co-founder & CTO
Dan is a highly experienced developer and technical architect, with a double first in maths from Oxford and five years experience developing software in the finance industry before leaving to work on his own projects. He was living in San Francisco when the first social network application platforms launched in 2007, where he built Open Socket, an Open Social container for Facebook, before moving back to London to found iPlatform with Josh.
Ben Godfrey, Senior Web Architect
Ben is a web architect and software engineer with 10 years experience, with CTO experience in 3 start-ups. Ben has built things for Fuji, Start-rite, TfL, Moblog, Huddle and Intruders. He's currently working on projects with a variety of platforms and tools including Python, Django, PHP, Google App Engine, Amazon EC2 and S3, REST API mashups, OAuth, HTML/CSS, JavaScript, Ajax with jQuery, social media tools including WordPress and Twitter and much more.
Ste Thompson, Interactive Designer
Ste is an interactive designer and flash wizard. He specialises in creating engaging flash applications and advertisements in social networks, and for a large variety of music clients.
Adam Charnock, Web Application Developer
Adam Charnock is a PHP web application wizard. He started his career in London following his degree in Computer Systems Engineering from The University of Warwick and has since worked with companies ranging from Gumtree.com to the Energy Saving Trust. He specialises in development using Zend Framework on Linux environments, and has recently deployed several applications to Amazon's EC2 infrastructure. When he is not hiding behind his computer Adam can be found relaxing in the park, loitering at conferences, and brainstorming new startup ideas.
Our History
When the social networks launched their first application platforms in 2007, Joshua March and Dan Lester saw a big opportunity. Josh, in London, had experience in previous ecommerce and social network businesses, and began working with developers to build Facebook applications for clients and advise them on their social networking strategy, and helped to set up the Facebook Developer Garage London (which he now hosts).
Meanwhilst, Dan, who had several years behind him developing for large corporates before leaving to go travelling, decided to stop off in Silicon Valley where he built Open Socket, an innovative programme allowing Open Social applications to run on Facebook. It was innovative enough that he presented it at Google HQ, and on returning to London at the beginning of 2008 presented it to the Facebook Developer Garage.
After meeting at the Facebook Developer Garage, Dan and Josh began to discuss how they could build scalable products that would allow brands to engage with users in the social networks in the most cost effective and beneficial way, and within a few months iPlatform was born. Since 2008 they’ve worked together to release a number of whitelabel application platforms, with the product list quickly growing, and have a client list including ITV, Comic Relief, Ministry of Sound and Google. They are also actively involved in the tech start-up scene in London, both socially and professionally.
You can read Josh’s blog here, follow his random thoughts and links on twitter here, and follow Dan here.