Promotion

Permit me to shamelesly announce my promotion to Chief Information Officer at Portero Inc.

Here is the Press Release on the wire this week.

Portero, Inc., is pleased to announce the promotion of Steve P. Francia to the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO), effective immediately. He will continue to report to Michael Sheldon, the company’s chairman and CEO, and will be responsible for operations and technology for the company.  In this role he will guide web, technology and infrastructure developments, which will further contribute to rapid and efficient growth, improved customer satisfaction and real-time business intelligence.

During the first half of fiscal year 2008, in the midst of a challenging economy, Portero has experienced explosive growth, exceeding last year’s revenues by almost 300%.   Portero has positioned itself as the premier online luxury destination and believes that Francia will be critical in guiding the technology that will define the luxury shopping online.

Steve brings 13 years experience in search, e-commerce and social networking. He successfully founded a consulting firm, Supernerd, whose clients included Priceline.com, Toyota, Real Salt Lake and Stanford University. Most recently, Francia built Takkle.com as one of the original six employees, and led it’s development team to launch and through 300,000 registered users.  He has an extensive background on the internet particularly with e-commerce and social networks. He is a passionate advocate of Open Source development, and architected the Zoop Framework, the first Object Oriented, and first AJAX framework for PHP.  Francia holds a BA from Brigham Young University in Philosophy.