Rob is a founder and the CTO of Runa Inc., an early stage start-up developing a Software as a Service for online merchants. Runa increases conversion of shoppers while on the merchant's site using real-time, individualized promotions.

At Runa, Rob is leading an agile development effort that is pushing the state-of-the-art in personalization, service scaling, statistical / semantic processing and ajax technologies. Our system architecture includes the use of HBase/Hadoop, Clojure, Swarmiji, AMQP/RabbitMQ, Redis and Opscode Chef.

Rob is also the President and Founder of Internet Bandwidth Development, a consultancy focusing on providing technology consulting specializing in backbone networks, access networks, wireless networks, and innovative Internet/Web applications and services. IBD has provided services to technology start-ups, top names in Internet hardware and software, as well as venture capital firms, including Panorama Capital, SkyPilot Networks, VISA, Cisco, Ascend, iPass, and Oki Networks.

Most recently Rob has been involved with software and web services development based on Ruby and Rails as a consultant or advisor at SkyPilot, TelTel, ZipDX and CloudScale.

Rob has been a principal or founder in several start-up network services and equipment companies including InternNex, MetroFi and UltraDevices. As an Internet pioneer in the early 90’s, Rob founded InterNex Services which was the first ISP to offer commercial ISDN Internet services, Frame Relay and higher speed business broadband services as well as one of the first o offer shared, dedicated and International Hosting Services. InterNex was later acquired by Concentric/XO.

Rob is a respected expert in IP networks and open source software and has been on the Advisory Boards of companies including Covad, Alteon Websystems (acquired by Nortel), AboveNet, WeFi, Boorah, GridNetworks, Cloudscale, Support Intelligence and Cosine Communications. He is a frequent speaker on Next Generation Networks at conferences including CTIA and APRICOT (Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies).

In 2002 - 2003 Rob was a visiting research fellow at the Center for Global Communications (GLOCOM www.glocom.ac.jp) in Tokyo with a focus on Open Spectrum technology (Ultra-wideband spread spectrum, Cognitive / Software Defined Radios, Wireless Mesh Networks, expanded unlicensed 802.11 wireless) and how it impacts spectrum policy.

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/robert_j_berger; my proof: https://keybase.io/robert_j_berger/sigs/R1Q1HT9k74LSBD18Hiq-SbT2t9sLEFiMLtyMnUmH88A ]