Murat Aktihanoglu

Founder and CEO: Murat Aktihanoglu has spent 16 years building advanced multi-user web-based virtual world applications at Silicon Graphics Inc, Web3D Consortium, Sony Corp. (San Jose,CA and Tokyo) and his own company, Holoscape Inc. He was one of the contributors to the VRML and X3D standards (ISO/IEC 19775) and has been involved with many startups in the multi-user virtual worlds and rich-media space.

He brings more than 20 years of virtual worlds, application architecture, research, team management and operations experience. He has served on the Technical Advisory Board of the Web3D Consortium and was one of the designers of X3D. He has worked on various immersive multi-user web platforms, mainly Cosmo Player, Blendo and Emma3D. He has also founded another startup (TheNextWeb) in 1999, building a product similar to Centrl, which has successfully produced the first working prototypes of users surfing the internet in a multi-user environment where they could share media assets and communicate in real-time with full spatial awareness.

Mr. Aktihanoglu holds a Masters degree in Computer Science and a BS in Electrics and Electronics. He has served as a consultant to many established companies (AT&T, Sony, Logitech) as well as startups (Improv, Sonicbox, Atair, Plaxo and Coollris) at the founding level to establish their engineering infrastructures and software development methodologies, and he has managed engineering teams at Silicon Graphics in Mountain View and Sony Corporation in Tokyo, Japan.

Eric Redlinger

Co-founder and VP Mobile Research & Development: Previously a principal and co-founder or 10base-t Interactive, a New York-based networking and streaming media consulting company, Eric has been working as a developer and consultant in the sphere of digital media and multi-user environments for over 12 years. He was first introduced to the world of interactive media in multi-user space while working with the core-development team on the UN-sponsored KeyWorx project in the latter part of the 20th century. Since then, he has taken his know-how to the domain of mobile devices.

The current and upcoming generations of smart-phones offer unprecedented possibilities for participation in digital communities, and user interest in these services, is huge. DropCopy, a native media-sharing application written by for the iPhone (using a pre-release SDK), has been downloaded over 300,000 times, despite the fact that this application will only run on a phone that has been "jailbroken" — i.e. hacked to be able to run 3rd-party applications.

Eric's previous projects include Mrmr, a technology to create and "push" interfaces to mobile devices from a central server, or between devices on an ad-hoc wireless network. Applications for Mrmr include media-sharing, social networking, multi-user gaming, location-based services, and others. In addition to his consulting work at 10base-t Interactive, Eric was a part-time researcher at Brooklyn Polytechnic's Integrated Digital Media Institute (IDMI), and he was on the adjunct faculty of Parsons School of Design in New York City.

2008

MAY

App for Facebook, Hi5, MySpace, Ning, Orkut, Friendster and Bebo are released.

Chat-bot technology is released.

Eric Redlinger joins Unype as co-founder.

DEC

Company receives funding.

Company changes name to Centrl Inc.

2009

MAR

Redesigned website goes live.

iPhone app is released.

MAY

Mobile apps for Blackberry and Android are released.

Mobile apps for Symbian and Windows Mobile are coming soon.