###
Albuquerque, NM

ABQid and the New Mexico Technology Council announce judges for Scrappy Startups V2V Edition.

“We’re supremely proud to announce an amazing line-up of judges for the upcoming Scrappy Startup V2V edition, national in scope and caliber” effused Webb Johnson, Managing Director of ABQid. The judges announced include Manolo Espinosa, VP of Soundcloud the world’s leading audio platform, Joanne Lang of AboutOne.com, the world’s only household management platform, Lori Upham, Chairman and COO of CureDM, a biopharmaceutical company established to develop new therapies that may prevent, ameliorate or reverse diabetes and allow for the discontinuation of insulin, and John McDermott, former CIO of Xerox and serial startup entrepreneur. Both organizations expressed their excitement on having these judges participate in the event scheduled on May 4th. They launched a domain to recruit applicants and attendees at www.GetScrappy.org, with prize announcements pending.

Manolo Espinosa – San Francisco
Manolo Espinosa is the Vice President of Platform at SoundCloud, the world’s leading audio platform. In this capacity, Manolo is responsible for SoundCloud’s API toolset, global developer evangelism, and integration with platforms such as Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Google and Apple. Prior to SoundCloud, Manolo was co-founder of IndexTank, a real-time, hosted search engine acquired by LinkedIn. Manolo holds degrees from Amherst College and Harvard University.

Joanne Lang – Philadelphia
Joanne Lang is the founder of AboutOne.com, the world’s only household management platform, and the smart, secure solution for managing family in the cloud. AboutOne’s suite of apps makes it easy to manage the family calendar, along with memories and household paperwork – at home or on-the-go. A former SAP cloud technology specialist, Joanne is the mom of four boys and one of Forbes Top 10 Female Entrepreneurs to Watch. She writes and speaks regularly on leveraging technology to simplify life and prepare for the future, and has raised over $5M in seed and series A funding since launching at VentureBeat DEMO. She is one of the 3% of women in tech who have raised capital in the US and was featured in Microsoft’s documentary, CTRL+ALT+COMPETE.

Loraine V. Upham – Albuquerque, NM
Loraine V. Upham, Lori serves as Chairman of the Board and Chief Operating Officer at CureDM, Inc. Ms. Upham served as Chief Executive and President of CureDM, Inc. She has 26 years of experience in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. A diverse and highly regarded career including the Molecular Genetics Research Department at Eli Lilly and Company, Merck and Co., Product Manager and Project Team Leader at Packard BioScience, Lori’s expansive work on diabetes led to the founding of CureDM. Playing key roles in both process development engineering and business development at Prolexys Pharmaceuticals (a spin-off of Myriad Genetics) provided critical exposure in the field of human proteomic biology that ultimately formed the basis for the CureDM discovery platform and the identification of the Human proIslet Peptide. As the Founding Chief Executive Officer of CureDM, she successfully obtained start up financing and engineered partnerships to conduct basic research and establish the preclinical proof of concept for HIP, which allowed progression into preclinical development. She has been a key and integral part in every facet of CureDM’s business, science and technology. Ms. Upham holds a BA in Biology from the University of Pennsylvania and an MBA from Arizona State University.

John McDermott – Santa Fe, NM
John serves as an advisor and investor in information technology start-ups and growth phase companies. He started several small, but highly successful companies before he obtained his MBA from Yale University.
John’s ten year career at Xerox culminated as CIO, where he contributed extensively to business simplification and system rationalization initiatives, during a period of dramatic turn-around at the company. Prior to Xerox he was a partner at Marakon Associates, a management consulting firm where he provided business strategy, operations improvement and organizational design, primarily in the technology and telecommunications industries. He was deeply involved in the business turnaround at IBM, an experience that has informed and guided much of his subsequent career. John serves the State of New Mexico as Chairman of the New Mexico Finance Authority and serves as a Board Member of ABQid, New Mexico’s leading start-up accelerator and seed investment firm.

###