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Ned Nenad Krtolica

Ned Krtolica is Croatian American entrepreneur who started his carrier in Zagreb Croatia cofounding his first startup BBN Sistemi in 1989. In 1995 he sold BBN Sistemi to Spectratek Systems from Milpitas moved to Mountain View and at the same time co-founded Cromerica Technologies. Cromerica Technologies business model was bringing seasoned software engineers to the Silicon Valley and either placing them to customer sites as contractors or developing in-house projects for customers.

Cromerica Technologies also developed some of the first application for PalmPilot called TimeZone and TZDatebook as well as one of the first fax servers called CTFax Server.

In mid 1995 Ned met Elon Musk who at the time was a co-founder and CEO of Zip2. Ned agreed to help Elon speed up the development of Zip2 portal that helps newspapers develop city directory-type Web sites by offering all available engineers to Zip2. At some point Ned's company had over ten developers working on Zip2 project. This cooperation lasted until 1999 when Compaq acquired Zip2 for it's search engine Alta Vista to better compete with Yahoo, Excite and Lycos. Unfortunately Alta Vista was not able to compete even with Zip2 technology and it closed its door in 2013.

In the meantime Ned was internally developing VivoCom Contact Service one of the first Internet Protocol Contact Centers for Customer Support in the world. The technology was based on two US patents 7360243 and 7587758. In 2000 Ned founded VivoCom and sold Cromerica Technologies to John Whalen who also became new CEO in combined enterprise. John was one of the early employees and VP at Netscape.

John was interested in sharing combined technology with Microsoft so he brought Ned and Dalibor Kukoleca to one of Microsoft software architects Christian Huitema in 2001. After the presentation Microsoft decided to develop the technology themselves instead of investing. After another year of trying to find other investors John decided to retire but Ned was not giving up.

In 2003 Ned founded his fourth startup AdriaComm raised angel round of investments and secured investment from Timothy DaSilva. Unfortunately Timothy was diagnosed with cancer therefore not able to complete funding obligation. The 2007-2009 Great Recession forced Ned to sell patents and parts of technology and close the door to the last startup.

With all the experience collected Ned decided to get involved in Open Source initiative as well as in software security and vulnerability. He was offering his services to companies like Cisco, Broadcom, Synopsys, Dassault Systemas, GE Digital and others.