Daniel Harple Inventions Information

Daniel Harple (born July 23, 1959) is an American entrepreneur, investor, inventor and engineer best known for his role in the creation of several Internet standards, among them, Real Time Streaming Protocol used in entertainment and communications systems such as YouTube, RealPlayer, QuickTime, Skype, and others. Harple has been called a visionary, an Internet pioneer, and a "serial entrepreneur", founding multiple technology start-ups and playing a key role in the development of technologies like collaborative groupware, Voice over IP, and interactive screen sharing whiteboards. Harple also holds a number of core technology patents for inventions in VoIP, media streaming, real time web communications, collaborative computing, and location-based social media.

He was co-founder, chairman and CEO of InSoft, Inc. which was merged with Netscape in 1996. He was also a co-founder of enterprise content integration technology provider, Context Media that was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2005. In 2007, he co-founded the location-based social network application provider, GeoSolutions, B.V. doing business as GyPSii. He is currently CEO and managing director of Amsterdam-based Shamrock Ventures BV.

A Rhode Island native, Harple performed as a teenage guitarist in garage rock bands during the 1970s, admittedly fascinated by his band's various electronic equipment and the connections between it. He studied Liberal Arts at Marlboro College from 1977 to 1981, and received Bachelor's degrees in Psychology and Mechanical engineering from the University of Rhode Island in 1982 and 1986, where he also completed graduate-level work. He also holds the M.Sc degree from MIT. Focusing on computer networking, he worked with the U.S. Department of Defense at the Naval Underwater Systems Center in the early 1980s, and later at companies such as AMP Incorporated and Ingersoll-Rand, where he became interested in applying principles of ergonomics to computer communications technology user interfaces in order to make it easy and convenient for the user.

As both the creator of technology that became the backbone of multimedia and real-time interactive communication, and founder a number of influential, venture-backed technology start-ups, Harple has been called a visionary, an Internet pioneer in real time interactive communications, and a "serial entrepreneur". According to co-founder of Vonage, Jeff Pulver, "If you use Skype, GoToMeeting or YouTube, among others, Harple's technology and its influence has touched your life."

Harple’s founding of Context Media influenced Enterprise Content Integration. Context Media tackled the big data problem by building technologies to search, connect, and display content across large extended enterprises. The extensive of use of metadata was deployed in this effort, which also resulted in an invention and subsequent patent by Harple in this area of collaborative real-time computing. Context Media was seen as the leader in the segment and subsequently acquired by Oracle, while the company's main competitor, Charlotte, North Carolina-based Venetica was later acquired by IBM.

Harple also championed a new dimension of the social media phenomenon: individually customizable, highly mobile, location-based experiences. "Rather than sitting indoors chatting to friends on an PC-based service - you can be out and about seeing who is nearby, what they are doing and where you could go - all in real time", he commented. An early developer, investor, and advocate of mobile social networking technology, he saw it growing faster outside of the US, telling the New York Times in 2008, "I moved to Europe because I thought the U.S. venture capital community -- which I was a part of -- was myopic," he said. "They can't see the global significance of what is happening."

In 1992, Harple co-founded InSoft with partner Richard Pizzarro. The Grantham, Pennsylvania company was a provider of distributed digital video solutions, desktop conferencing and videoconferencing applications. The Internet media streaming, telephony and collaborative applications originated by InSoft laid the foundation for development of the Real Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) standard.

InSoft merged with Netscape in 1996, for a value of $161 million. A chapter in former Wall Street Journal columnist Tom Petzinger’s book, “The New Pioneers: The Men and Women Who Are Transforming the Workplace and Marketplace,” is devoted to the story of InSoft during the early days of the Internet.

Following the merger of Insoft, Harple served as Senior Vice President at Netscape. Harple's team used the collaborative computing and streaming media technologies created at InSoft as the basis for new Netscape products such as LiveAudio and LiveVideo. These efforts led to the creation of a number of internet standards, including Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP).

Netscape integrated a number of products initially developed by InSoft, including the first streaming media system called Netscape Media Server, the first Internet telephony technology called Netscape Conference, and the first media developers' platform called Netscape LiveMedia, as well as Netscape CoolTalk which was built on an early version of InSoft's shared whiteboard application.

Harple founded Context Media in 1999, and described the company's goal to "create a fundamentally different way to matrix and share content between sites, and enable a new form of content commerce -- one where sites can become their own hubs of syndication and create content relationships based on context." The company won numerous industry awards.Products like Interchange Suite 3.0 allowed distributed and disparate digital asset and content repositories to remain distributed, while giving users a single, unified way to access the content the repositories contained. During this period computer scientist Andries van Dam served as Chairman of the company's Technical Advisory Board, working with Harple to develop standards-based protocols that would give Interchange Suite users the ability to seamlessly interact with and manipulate content stored in differing locations by differing applications.

Harple served as President and CEO of Context Media until the company was sold to Oracle Corporation in 2005. Context Media's content-integration software formed the basis of Oracle's collaborative search middleware product Fusion, that added content-management capabilities to application product lines.

In the mid-1990s, Harple became friends with songwriter and record producer Todd Rundgren, with whom he co-founded Context Labs, a media research company focused on exploring and developing new technologies intended to enhance and converge traditional media delivery systems for audio, video and music with the web. The company's name echoed Rundgren's and Harple's vision of "recontextualizing" the Internet by developing tools and products that helped process the vast amount of knowledge contained in it, "putting it into a context that derives the most meaning to each of us as individuals."

Harple worked with Rundgren on many projects. Patronet embodied Harple's goal of a more personalized Internet experience where users could combine different parts of an artist or band’s web presence, such as video clips, band news or songs, to create an individualized context meaningful to them. Harple's research and experience with Patronet and Context Labs led him to subsequently found Context Media. Some time later in 2004, Harple acquired the pyramid stage set from Rundgren’s 1976 Ra (Utopia album) tour and installed it as a sculpture in a natural setting in coastal Massachusetts.

In 2006, Harple moved to the Netherlands where he co-founded GeoSolutions, B.V. (doing business as GyPSii), an Amsterdam-based company whose location-based social networking technology gained adoption through telecom companies in Asia, Europe and Latin America. GyPSii was designed so that carriers could choose to either install a GyPSii app on mobile devices or use GyPSii technology to build customized applications. Harple and co-founder Sam Critchley are credited with the initial creation of GyPSii. The resulting startup was acquired and merged by GeoSentric OYJ, a NASDAQ-listed company in Finland, where Harple subsequently assumed the role of Executive Chairman and Group CEO. In September 2010, Harple resigned from this role to pursue personal and professional activities with Shamrock Ventures, B.V. He continues as a major shareholder and lead inventor/patent-holder to GeoSentric and its technologies.

Launched by Harple in 2008, GyPSii's "social, local, mobile" application utilizes GPS to allow mobile device users to search and identify contacts locally or internationally and add a real time, location-based element to social networking. By May, 2010 GyPSii reported it reached over two million users in its first year. GyPSii allows mobile phone users to create user-generated content in real time. In March 2010, GyPSii launched Tweetsii, a real time app for the iPhone, Android and BlackBerry platforms.

Prior to Harple's departure, GyPSii oversaw a joint venture with China’s Sina.com to embed GyPSii technology at a platform level in its Twitter-like microblog, Weibo. China Unicom also partnered with GyPSii, using its technology to bundle GyPSii on all iPhones in China and launch a China-based social networking application for the iPhone called Unispace.

Harple is currently CEO and managing director of Shamrock Ventures BV in Amsterdam, offering strategic guidance to entrepreneurs to structure, start, and navigate companies from inception to liquidity events.

In 2013, Harple established Context Labs, BV (CXL) based in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Amsterdam, The Netherlands. According to the company, it offers enterprise grade platform solutions that assist in the development of new market channels and reducing channel friction, while retaining and growing direct customer relationships. Based in part on Harple's work at MIT Sloan and the MIT Media Lab concentrating on "innovation dynamics" that resulted in a platform called InnovationScope, which functions to identify and describe innovation and its contributing components, the company's offerings are focused on the integration of secure distributed and shared ledgers (Blockchain), network graph analytics and visualizations, data interoperability, trusted identity management, and micro-payment enablement. The company's platform product line includes Chainplate Foundation, Snapshackle Interoperability, and VUEGraph Analytics.

Partnering with architectural design firm Rogers Partners in 2014, the company utilized innovation dynamics methods to collaborate on design for the Connect Kendall Square project. In 2016, R. R. Donnelley and Sons announced it would partner with the company to develop blockchain-enabled technology solutions for its publishing customers.

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