Jon Dakss has been a driving force of both the technology and business of iTV and has made a considerable impact on the iTV industry over the past 10 years.  Jon’s iTV career started in 1999 when he founded WatchPoint Media with his MIT professor and two colleagues, commercializing iTV technology he had developed as an MIT grad student.  The company went on to develop the industry’s first visual iTV authoring tool “StoryTeller” and led a successful market test of the company’s innovative “video hot-spotting” technology with NBC, Pearson Television, Telepictures, Proctor & Gamble, PBS and Alliance Atlantis as content partners.  In 2002 Jon opened WatchPoint’s London office as a joint venture with Ascent Media and worked with a number of European broadcasters and platform operators as CTO.

After WatchPoint Media was acquired by GoldPocket Interactive in 2003, Jon became Vice President of Technology and Distribution and continued to forge new ground within the iTV industry.  Jon played a major role in facilitating the industry’s first deployment of synchronous enhanced TV in a digital cable environment – GSN’s iTV launch with Oceanic Time Warner Cable in 2004.  This paved the way for a number of other noteworthy iTV and eTV deployments in North America, including launches with Bell ExpressVu, Cablevision and DISH Network.  At GoldPocket Jon was also chair of the iTV Standards committee as well as one of the key contributors to the CableLabs “EBIF” specification.

Jon came to NBC Universal in 2005 and partnered with many NBCU networks to help lead an explosion of groundbreaking interactive initiatives across mobile, online and set-top box.  Noteworthy projects have included NBC’s “Deal or No Deal,” Bravo’s “InfoFrame,” and interactivity for the Beijing Olympics which featured the industry’s first broadcast EBIF app.  Jon leads NBC Universal’s Interactive Media Technology team, which focuses primarily on Advanced/Interactive Media and Mobile technology initiatives.  He is lead inventor and co-inventor of eleven awarded US patents and co-inventor of fourteen US & International patents pending.

Jon lives with his wife Marcy and three children in Monrovia, California.