Tom Drapeau

Oversee development of the iHeartRadio platform, 800+ local radio station websites, and the connective tissue in between.

Led the brain trust behind the buildout of a next generation custom radio product for use in the iHeartRadio brand. Product blended algorithmic, editorial and user behavior data to create a best in class adaptive digital radio product while adhering to DMCA restrictions. Applications included artist, song and theme-based radio stations (aka "iHeart Originals").

End-to-end technical lead for iHeartRadio royalty reporting, and in this role, grew and matured all processes needed to ensure accurate identification of songs played on iHeartRadio and their royalty payouts, both to SoundExchange and direct to labels.

Drove requirements and optimizations needed to bring Clear Channel's broadcast radio royalty reporting to parity with that of iHeartRadio's DMCA-compliant Custom Radio.

Doubled the size of iHeartRadio's live radio station directory by adding stations from other radio groups such as Univision, Cumulus Media and Greater Media to Clear Channel's owned and operated stations. In doing so, worked directly with more than a dozen radio groups and 5 CDNs to formalize and standardize intake of station information, while developing methods to externalize communication of enriched metadata, now playing information and 24x7 operational monitors.

Led several skunkwork projects to allow technology to drive product innovation.

Managed the buildout of the largest streaming music catalog on the Web (over 10 million tracks) built with 50+ label and aggregator feeds and augmented with classification, acoustic and cultural data from Rovi, The Echo Nest and others.

Responsible for all web services powering Thumbplay Music, a subscription based streaming music service. Rolled out a number of improvements including: MongoDB for scaling member music collections; a billing integration with Chase Paymentech to aid in retention; a more robust offer platform allowing initial free period and bulk offers; an internal merchandising tool. Achieved PCI Compliance for a level 3 merchant.

Acted as general manager and business owner for several facets of the Netscape brand including Propeller.com (originally Netscape.com), a social news site; My.Netscape, a personalized start page; Netscape Navigator, a Mozilla-derived web browser. As of October 2010, all are defunct.

Built a thriving community of 500k+ members on the social news site. As such, managed user policing, spam detection and other abuse while promoting quality news content. Managed member feedback to ensure products met with member satisfaction.

Oversaw development of several extensions to aid in distribution of Propeller news, including a Facebook application, fan page and Facebook Connect implementation; a Twitter module and Twitter OAuth; and a robust email notification system.

Aided Surphace, owned and operated by AOL, in launching a self service version of their Sphere Related Content module, called “s4”. Two months after the launch of the private beta, the module is live on hundreds of sites and exceeds 500k page views per day. Participated in defining product requirements, UX, wrote the Wordpress plugin and defined CRM strategy.

Acted as product lead for a major improvement to a Java servlet-based community platform which supports article comments and message boards for sites such as FanHouse, AOL News, Daily Finance, Politics Daily and Black Voices. Introduced REST and JavaScript APIs to simplify client installs, improve platform compatibility, and power a new and improved moderation console.

Created an online poll system for use in the Ask Jeeves “Smiley Central” browser toolbar. Utilized Java Spring, J2SE 5.0, JSP w/JSTL on Tomcat connecting to an Oracle database.

Acted as core contributor on a new portal architecture for Ask Jeeves and a first implementation called Smiley Today! This involved writing a portlet-style framework using Spring, J2SE 5.0, the Velocity API, and simple Java sockets to connect from client farm to server farm. The architecture included JMX management extensions, custom class loaders, independently deployed components and services, and a comprehensive service cache layer.

Managed and acted as lead developer on several projects for the public facing hotjobs.yahoo.com. The technologies used for these projects included C, C++ and PHP on FreeBSD. Projects included:

-Integration of the proprietary Yahoo search engine technology into the hotjobs site for job searching.
-Created a scalable co-branding solution for partners of HotJobs.
-A complete site redesign including a platform upgrade to PHP.
-Creation of adapters for existing proprietary I/O proxy system.
-Extensive work with a legacy C/CGI/Pro-C/Oracle platform for several minor upgrades to the HotJobs site.

Participated in a number of research and development projects, including:
-Application of a similarity thesaurus for matching jobs to resumes.
-Creation of a job recommendation engine using a combination of behavioral analysis and an affinity engine.
-Participated in an extended study into a new platform encompassing backoffice systems and a new version of hotjobs.yahoo.com for paid members. Plans for the new platform included using a JBoss application tier and Siebel.
-Acted as an instructor and administrator in an internal education program.