executives

Mohammed Smadi
-CEO/CTO
Mohammed Smadi is the CEO/CTO of PenguinIN, where he leads the business and technical development of opportunistic, managed indoor positioning solutions. Prior to PenguinIN, Mohammed founded Karmatix, a telematics-based loyalty program where he coined the term “road-as-a-service”.
Before Karmatix, Mohammed was a principal researcher at BlackBerry driving Quality of Experience over Wi-Fi. Mohammed is also the co-founder of ErgoWiFi: technology provider for solar-powered Wi-Fi mesh access points. Mohammed holds +25 granted/pending patents in addition to authoring several refereed papers and book chapters.
Mohammed has a PhD, M.A.Sc and B.Eng. & Mgmt. from McMaster University’s ECE where he is currently an adjunct assistant professor.
BOARD & ADVISORS

Samer Taha
-Chairman of Board
Dr. Samer Taha is the Chairman of the Board of PenguinIN, he provides guidance to the executive management of PenguinIN on the technology commercialization strategy and financial strategy of the company.
Dr. Taha is also the Executive Chairman of Revonence Technologies International, a holding company that funds and invests in the commercialization of emerging technologies. In 2007 he founded Waseela, a regional ICT system integrator, and led its expansion as its CEO until 2017; during this period, he led the delivery of mega infrastructure ICT projects of more than $200 million.
In 2002 he joined Intel Corporation where he worked as a senior research engineer and R&D manager for 5 years in next-generation silicon wafer processing technologies and embedded wireless systems, during which he published 4 patents.
Prior to that, between 1999 and 2002, Samer was a member of the CICTR Lab at the Penn State University where he received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering in 2002. Samer received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the Jordan University of Science & Technology.

Ian Sugarbroad
-Board Advisor
Ian is an expert and serial entrepreneur in Wireless Technologies, having successfully led start-ups in both the US and UK.
He is currently an independent project consultant working with Blue Dots Partners in the Silicon Valley. Ian is an advisor to the board of PenguinIN Inc., a company specializing in managed indoor positioning from Irvine, USA and PervasID Ltd., a company specializing in high performance RFID systems from Cambridge, UK.
Of the VC funded companies that Ian ran, two of them, Zinwave Ltd and LGC Wireless Inc, resulted in M&A exits and the third, InterWave Int’l Ltd, exited on the NASDAQ.
Earlier in his career Ian held a number of senior executive positions at larger multi-national corporations, the most significant of which was at Nortel Networks, where he was a company officer and VP, Business Development in the original wireless team that built a $2.4B global business in digital cellular equipment in the early days of that technology.
Ian holds an MBA and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from London University in the UK and Western University in Canada, and currently lives in South Florida, USA.

Vytas Kezys
-Board Advisor
Vytas Kezys is a seasoned technical strategist and recognized leader in mobile wireless. His career focuses on leveraging a broad technical background and concept-to-product experience to develop leading wireless solutions.
He pioneered work in array signal processing including early development of MU-MIMO and has demonstrated expertise in a wide range of fields including Wi-Fi, RF propagation, statistical signal processing, indoor navigation and sensor fusion/SLAM. Prior to working with Teslonix as CTO, he was Director of Advanced Connectivity at Blackberry where he developed and launched their first Wi-Fi enabled handhelds and drove the adoption of various connectivity technologies.
Vytas was the Founder and President of TalariCom where he led the development of cost effective smart antenna technologies. He was Principal Research Engineer at the Communications Research Laboratory, McMaster University, focusing on array signal processing, radar and smart antennas.
Vytas has held numerous consulting positions and is an inventor on over 30 patents. He holds a B.Eng. degree in Electrical Engineering from McMaster University.