While the US went rafting during their offsite meeting, the BCN team trekked, canoed and went wild in the Pyrenees. Recognize some US team members in these pictures? They can’t resist a good party (more photos here).

We are happy to announce that Jason Herskowitz has joined MyStrands as Vice President of Consumer Products.

Jason has spent the past 15 years engaged in virtually all links of the digital media value chain – from consumer services to consumer hardware to development tools to semiconductors.

His background includes extensive experience in product management, product marketing, brand marketing, strategy and market development. Most recently Jason served as the Director of Music Products at AOL – which included the AOL Music, AOL Radio, Music Now, Winamp and SHOUTcast properties.

It is a pleasure for us having Jason on board.

Find out who is who here.

MyStrands is extremely pleased to announce that long time industry fixtures, Gary Geller and Scott Lehr have joined the team.

Gary Geller joins as the Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing, while Scott Lehr joins as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. This duo, which has been working together for the last decade, has a sales and development history that is not only remarkable but an incredible asset for MyStrands to acquire.

Gary Geller

Scott Lehr

Gary joined Muze Inc., the leading provider of Media Information and Digital Services, as one of its first employees in 1992. Gary facilitated an increase in the company’s revenue base from the low-six figures to 10s of Millions in revenue. He was responsible for securing, developing and managing Muze’s major accounts including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Tower Records, Best Buy, Trans World Entertainment, Yahoo!, Wal-Mart, Netflix and many others. As a Senior Vice President, Geller was instrumental in the development and expansion of the company from a simple data provider to a technology and service partner.

Scott spent the last 11 years with Muze Inc. In his most recent position as Vice President of Corporate Development, he created critical strategic relationships with Fox Interactive Media and Nielsen Business Media’s properties including Billboard and the Hollywood Reporter. He also played a key role in developing strategies for expanding the company’s business in Europe and Asia. As Vice President of Sales & Business Development at Muze, Scott helped develop business models and go-to-market strategies for the company’s media information licensing business and negotiated deals with global brands such as Apple, Microsoft, eBay, AOL, and Yahoo!

We have already seen that Gary and Scott bring a great deal of energy, drive and excitement along with them. We are very excited to welcome them to the MyStrands team and are looking forward to the growth and development they will inspire. It’s going to be a fun ride!

The MyStrands Team in Corvallis recently decided to shoot the Deschutes River for some class 3 and 4 rapids. Bring on the white water!

See all the photos here.

We are happy to announce that Scott Kveton has joined MyStrands as the Open Technology Lead.

Scott Kveton is a digital identity promoter and open source advocate. Scott has worked at Amazon, RuleSpace.com and JanRain as well as founded the Open Source Lab at Oregon State University. Working closely with projects like Mozilla, Linux, Drupal and Apache led Scott down the identity path and to JanRain in mid-2006. Scott was named to Red Herring’s list of ‘25 Titans in waiting’ in early 2007 and ‘InformationWeek’s Change Agents’ in December 2005.

We have some exciting plans linking social recommendation technologies with the open web, and Scotts visionary and leadership abilities will be key in helping us define and execute our objective: to help people discover things they like and didn’t know about already.

It is a pleasure for us having Scottt on board. He has some great skills which he already showed during the interviewing process.

This past weekend, the MyStrands sponsored “Team PartyStrands” took part in the great adventure that is the 197-mile Hood to Coast relay race. The 12 runners, each running an average of more than 16 miles, covered the distance from Oregon’s Mt. Hood to the coastal town of Seaside in just over 26 1/2 hours. As fun as it was challenging, the accomplishment called for equal measures of energy and enthusiasm combined with grace under pressure and a never-say-die attitude. Come to think of it, it wasn’t so different than a typical day at MyStrands where we give our all to unleashing the coolest products with the most innovative technology. Well, except that you don’t get as sore from developing software as from running over the coastal range.

So congrats to all of the PartyStrands runners with special thanks to our friends and teammates recruited from Amazon and fellow Corvallis software companies Cleverset and Alsea Geospatial!

Team partyStrands, with CEO Francisco J Martin far left, is nothing but confident before leaving from MyStrands’ Corvallis offices

Gerardo, MyStrands software engineer and runner extraordinnaire, taking time out for a pose in front of Mt. Hood at the start of the 2006 Hood to Coast relay.

(More pics here).