Candidate Statement - Jean-Marie Geffroy

Dear members, I feel very glad to represent Mantano in applying for a seat on the Readium Foundation Board.

Mantano had the chance to join the Foundation early as a founding member, and has been amongst the first companies who have publicly released e-reading apps based on Readium. Mantano is an active contributor to the Readium SDK and would be very honored to have the opportunity to further extend its commitment to this great project and help ensuring that it reaches the long-term success it deserves.

Statement of interest

As a member of the Board, I will share my technical insights and experience to promote Readium as a Reference implementation for Epub 3. Readium is already a success and has proven an amazing traction. Readium SDK is now close to getting a wide adoption and has the potential to really fulfill its goal. As a consequence it’s really time to further accelerate and improve it in order to take it to the next level: developments efforts remain to be done, especially from an architectural point of view, in order to provide maximum user experience, reliability and flexibility. The Edupub initiative is also a very promising project and the implementation inside Readium will raise interesting topics.

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 and Edupub, constantly recruiting new adopters.

I am currently the President of Mantano, a passionate R&D company which 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 and on the education market. 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.