Vice President of Engineering recognized for innovation and leadership
ORLANDO, FL – March 4, 2016 – IZEA, Inc. (NASDAQ: IZEA), operators of IZEAx, the premier online marketplace connecting brands and publishers with influential content creators, are proud to announce that Chris Staymates, the company’s Vice President of Engineering, has been named an Orlando Business Journal Tech IQ Award honoree to be recognized at a private function this evening.
The Tech IQ award celebrates top technologists and innovators across the Central Florida region for advances in technology in various fields, including e-commerce, manufacturing, hardware, software and cloud computing.
“In an industry filled with brilliant minds, it’s the rare individual who brings together intellect, passion, and flexibility in ways that can profoundly advance a business as Chris has,” said Ted Murphy, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of IZEA. “We are thrilled that the Orlando Business Journal has recognized him through this prestigious award and are grateful to have his talent as part of Team IZEA.”
In his time with IZEA, Chris has extended IZEA’s web-based marketplace to mobile through the release of IZEA for iOS. Chris also led the implementation of key product offerings, including the development of the IZEA Score Suite ™ – a trio of new social-scoring algorithms that help marketers make more informed sponsored content decisions announced at IZEAFest 2015. Chris has also been instrumental in the rapid expansion of the IZEA engineering team to meet the demands of the growing organization. He has developed a comprehensive program to identify, recruit, and retain top software, interface, and analytics talent for the company.
Prior to IZEA, Chris was Co-Founder of Row Sham Bow, an online game developer and creator of Gamasutra’s Social Game of the Year, Woodland Heroes. Earlier in his career, Staymates served as Software Architect and Lead Engineer for Electronics Arts, where he led a team of 30 engineers and owned the software architecture road map for key console franchises, including “Madden NFL,” “NCAA Football,” and “NFL Blitz.” In addition, he designed and led the implementation of ‘SuperSim’ at EA, a cross-platform, cross product football simulation engine.
Staymates is a Cum Laude graduate of The University of Florida with a Bachelor of Science in Computer Information Science & Engineering. He serves on the Industry Advisory Board of the University of Central Florida Computer Science Department and the Industry Advisory Board for the Game and Simulation Programming Department at DeVry University. He is also a Co-Founder of Canvs, a co-working space and nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Central Florida’s startup community.
