Can KIRAL, Tagvance Board Member, CEO

Can, has an excellent track record of building team of board members to facilitate clients outreach into decision makers from government, standard bodies and industry groups. He creates strategic alliances with service providers, global vendors and organizations offering innovative products and services. He has been involved in founding and advising many ventures to become the first choice of many telco operators in obtaining the right-of-way permits and outsourcing innovative projects. He created the first A-Z mobile payment and ticketing platform for the public transportation sector and influenced mobile operators to participate in the mobile ticketing initiative.

He has been also closely working with incumbent companies such as Deutsche Telecom, AT&T, Turkcell, Vodafone, Life, STC, Etisalat, Du, and AVEA.

Kyoung Jun Lee, Tagvance Board Member 

Professor of School of Management in Kyung Hee University, visiting professor of UC Berkeley BEST Lab and of MIT Mobile Experience Lab, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. He is also the founder and the director of BMER (Business Model Education and Research)

Kyoung has been involved in founding and advising Internet start-ups in Korea, such as Cyworld, Naver, Mobilians.co.kr, Galaxia Communications, YES24.com etc. He has been also closely working with incumbent companies such as SKT (SK Telecom), BC Card, NHN (The top Internet Company in Korea), Samsung, KT (Korea Telecom), TU Media, and KTO (Korea Tourism Organization) etc.

He has dozens of patents, approved or pending, and published papers in Decision Support Systems, RFID & Electronic Commerce such as tag match advertising, NFC based comparison shopping, ubiquitous referral marketing.

Alper Celen, Tagvance Board Member

Alper Celen, founded COMMIT Network with a passion for business in the Middle East. Prior to COMMIT, Alper was member of the leadership team of McKinsey & Company’s Scandinavia Office where he led projects in telecom, supply chain, FMCG, and basic materials sectors in the Middle East and Europe and was an organization design expert for leading high-tech and public sector clients. Alper’s McKinsey experience included serving major global telecom companies in redesigning their organizations and building new businesses.

Before McKinsey, Alper was a manager at Nokia Corporate Strategy where he focused on technology strategy and roadmaps. Prior to Nokia, Alper built a mobile marketing company in the USA called OpenThird. Alper has held management and engineering positions at three high-tech companies in the USA: Ansys where he managed EDA software sales, IBM where he worked on early 3G chipset designs, and Millitech, a NASA contractor where he was product line manager for antennas and remote sensing devices.

Alper has an MBA with high distinction from MIT Sloan School of Management and an ME and BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Virginia. He is on the advisory boards of Hyper[In] Inc., GenieTag, and non-profit organizations Entrepreneurs’ Organization Turkey, and Siebel Scholarship Foundation. He volunteers for MIT Enterprise Forum Pan Arab Chapter, and MIT Education Council and is the founder of Mobile Monday Riyadh and Dubai Chapters.

Hosam Herzallah, Tagvance Board Member

Husam is a serial entrepreneur, founded and serving on the boards of many ventures in the UK, UAE,  Egypt, Libya, and Turkey.

He has been in the telecommunications domain for more than 20 years.

His recent investments include cloud based Open Platform-as-a-Service frameworks. The company is under contract by various UK and European companies to maintain next generation multi-touch enabled gaming and virtual reality applications for the retail and PoS market.

Tarek Elesseily – Tagvance Board Member

Tarek is the General Manager of Silicon Vision and Co-Founder of Cloud Niners. Tarek runs the company building web-scale RIA (Rich Internet Applications), embedded firmware, distributed storage solutions, enterprise business applications, and cloud computing solutions.

Members of Cloud9ers cloud development team built the IaaS cloud solution for Sun Microsystems, later acquired by Oracle.

His Android development company team is contracted to build a suite of Android tablet based applications for the retail and POS market.

As Amazon AWS’ first partner in the middle east, his team is uniquely positioned to advise, deploy, migrate and scale applications to the Amazon cloud environment.