Serge Soudoplatoff is the president and co-founder of Almatropie, an association devoted to the promotion of innovative Internet usage. As such, he continues a distinguished career on the leading edge of high technology. He is also one of the co-founder of HighDeal. Prior to HighDeal, he was Director of Innovation for France Telecom, driving the telco giant’s work group defining Internet policy and action plans. As such, he launched projects on mobility and the Internet, corporate IP telephony, and the services and new economic models needed in the Internet age. Before joining France Telecom, he managed the innovation research center in Paris for Cap Gemini. He also did research on speech and pattern recognition at IBM research labs in Yorktown Heights, NY, and spent several years as a university professor. He began his career as a geographical engineer for the French national geographical institute, doing image recognition and satellite positioning. Mr. Soudoplatoff is a former secretary general of CP2i, a prestigious French professional group founded by the country’s top research organizations to promote high tech innovation. He has an engineering degree from the Ecole Polytechnique, the French moral equivalent of a Ph.D. from MIT. In addition to speaking fluent English and French, he is conversant in Russian.