Blake Senftner

Blake is an innovative business thinker and is a veteran of the video games and film visual effects industries. His first job out of undergraduate school at Harvard and Boston University was to create and maintain a working clone of the Mac interface for PacTel’s PC workstations, which was in use from from 1988-1993.

After working at PacTel, Blake led interactive multimedia development at Phillips, where he was the sole developer for 13 interactive documentaries, each averaging 7 hours in length and produced in 8 languages. At Phillips, he designed their second large scale digital asset management production system that tracked, compiled and built interactive disc images on demand.

Electronic Arts recruited Blake to work on the 3DO operating system, where he wrote the 3DO’s low level data- and video-streaming libraries. When the 3DO launch failed, he was recruited by Sony to work on the PlayStation operating system in Tokyo. After returning to the US, he worked for a number of games studios, including Pandemic Studios and Adrenaline Interactive, on high- and no-profile games, such as NCAA Football, Madden and Eggs of Steel.

In 1999, Blake worked as Director of Research for Rotor Communications, a pre-Youtube video streaming website. He developed video watermarking techniques which performed synchronization of multiple data streams (whiteboards, chats, polls, quizes) with the video, and demonstrated the technology by producing a 45-minute live variety show featuring local Los Angeles rock bands.

Blake left the games industry in 2002 to work on feature film visual effects at the Academy Award-winning Rhythm and Hues Studios. At the same time, he began night school for his MBA. After 6 films as a digital artist, he transitioned to the finance department where he was the only person in the studio who could write code, produce art and generate the cost accounting bottom line impact of issue solutions.

Also while at Rhythm and Hues, Blake created a studio forecasting system that used stochastic modeling to assign personnel studio-wide, identifying the best person for a task and helping the studio manage multiple 2000+ person jobs at once.

Clearly an underachiever, Blake seconded his class and completed his MBA with Beta Gamma Sigma International Business Honors and left Rhythm and Hues to found Flixor, a media technology startup that holds the global patent on Personalized Media. Personalized Media is online media that is on-the-fly modified to appeal to the viewer via replacing actors with the likeness of their family and friends as well as demographically selected product placements.

Desiring to use Drupal as Flixor’s online technology platform, Blake found he had to become a Drupal ninja in order to develop what he needed in Drupal. Blake architected and developed the Aureus Digital Forensics platform, an outgrowth of Flixor’s technology, for a recent client whose customers are 3-lettered governmental agencies who use this technology to track and identify persons of interest.