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About: James Leftwich, IDSA is CXO - Chief Experience Officer at SeeqPod, Inc. in Emeryville, California.

After knowing SeeqPod's team for nearly two years, and having had them as a client for the past year, he joined as CXO - Chief Experience Officer. He is currently leading User Experience and Design, with a goal of making the SeeqPod search engine experience friendly, simple, and powerful for its users. By establishing the CXO position, SeeqPod has set an important precedent for the centrality of the User Experience and Design to its core vision and values.

SeeqPod's a totally different breed of search & discovery technology provider. In addition to its Finance, Music and Wikipedia search & discovery engines, SeeqPod has plans to launch search & discovery engines within a variety of other verticals.

Born out of UC's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), 'Playable Search' uses biomimetic search & discovery technology, which mimics the way the human mind might use context to make and recall associations, an approach relying on context by finding hidden relationships in digital content and data.

Leftwich is also founder and principal of Orbit Interaction, a pioneering and broad-based interaction design and intellectual property development consultancy located in Palo Alto, California. Trained as an industrial designer, he has over 24 years of broad consulting experience in the area of Human Interface development.

From April 2004 through November 2004 he was Director of Design and User Experience at PalmSource, Inc. in Sunnyvale, California, where he was involved in a proprietary project. From 2001 through March 2004 he served as Director of Human Interface and Industrial Design with PEMSTAR Pacific Consultants, Inc.. In 2004 his work on the industrial design and human interface for the Natus ALGO3i Newborn Hearing Screener won two major design awards. The first was a Medical Design Excellence Award (MDEA2004), the highest design award given by the medical industry. The Natus ALGO3i also won a Bronze Award in Business Week Magazine and the Industrial Designers Society of America's IDEA 2004 (Industrial Design Excellence Awards).

His interaction architecture and design has spanned a broad range of products, devices, systems, and software and has been part of numerous award-winning products. Mr. Leftwich also has extensive experience developing non-PC interfaces, ranging from wearables, palmtops, gestural slates, webpads, and gyroscope-based remote controls in the fields of consumer, industrial, military, and medical devices and systems. His clients have included Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Apple Computer, Macromedia, Starsight Telecast (Gemstar), Polaroid, Kensington, Gyration, Acuson, Coherent, Pinnacle Systems, and Avica.

Mr. Leftwich holds 12 utility patents in human interface system methodologies and has numerous patents pending. A native of Missouri, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Design at the Kansas City Art Institute in 1983.

Board of Advisors - SayHeyHey! http://www.sayheyhey.com
Board of Advisors - MANA - Midwives Alliance of North America
MANA Statistics Project http://www.mana.org/statform.html
Member - Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) http://www.idsa.org