Candidate Statement - Jean-Marie Geffroy

Dear members, I feel very glad to apply for the Readium Foundation Board. I am the President & Founder of Mantano, which had the chance to join the Foundation early as a founding member, invited by other stakeholders. Mantano is an active contributor to the Readium SDK and I would be very honored to have the opportunity to further stengthen my commitment to this great project and help ensuring that it reaches the long-term success it deserves.

As a member of the Board, I would share my experience of the e-reading industry, technical insights and knowledge of large-scale potential markets such as european governmental educational organizations to leverage the impact of Epub 3 and promote Readium as a Reference implementation.

About me

I am an entrepreneur very involved in innovation and knowledge sharing. I am an active evangelist for open standards such as Epub 3, OPDS or Edupub, constantly recruiting new adopters.

I am currently the President of Mantano, a passionate R&D company, obsessed by creating smart and sleek software to streamline and enhance the sharing of knowledge. Developing software for digital publishing, e-reading and e-learning since 2007, we have a strong worldwide reputation of excellence. We pay a very special attention to performance optimization, UX design, and customer feedback.

Mantano develops a complete e-reading platform, including mobile reading applications and cloud-based services. Our flagship product, Mantano Reader, is very popular amongst power readers. We sell it on the B2C app markets, and also sell white-label versions to device manufacturers, solution integrators, publishers, retailers, schools and universities.

Since the creation of Mantano, I have initiated a few large french and european R&D consortiums related to education, in partnership with telecom companies, chipset and devices manufacturers, and school and universities networks.

Before creating Mantano, I have been a researcher and teacher in Computer Science in the french National Research Center in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) for 12 years, specialized in software performance optimization. I created my first technical consultancy company in 1999 and achieved a lot of critical technical missions for tech startups. I fell in love with e-paper technology in 2007 and became consultant for Netronix Inc., one of the leading e-ink devices manufacturers. We have then implemented many reading systems, as well as a complete eink device firmware