our team

jory bell, founder

In 2000, Jory Bell co-founded OQO with Jonathan Betts-LaCroix.

Prior to founding OQO, Jory worked in Apple Product Design, where he was one of the primary product designers of the G3 Powerbook line and co-conceived theTitanium Powerbook. Jory was previously at IBM's Almaden Research Center, developing new portable computing hardware for IBM's ThinkPad line. Jory also worked at MIT, developing moored oceanographic instruments for climate change research.

Jory has patents pending for inventions in Powerbooks, iBooks and OQO computers.

Jory received three simultaneous B.S. degrees from MIT in earth atmospheric and planetary studies (EAPS), visual design, and literature.

jonathan betts-lacroix, founder, cto

Prior to founding OQO, Jonathan Betts-LaCroix founded Analog Design, an electrical engineering design-and-build firm with clients including IBM, Apple Computer, and Maxtor. In 1998, he was the founder and primary technical and business contributor for Unilinear, where he developed a snap-on PC-card/wireless adapter for Palm-compatible PDA's. Jonathan previously worked as a researcher at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

Jonathan has several patents issued and pending in the area of analog electronics, including the "floating triangle" A-D converter in the IBM TrackPoint pointing device.

Jonathan holds an A.B. from Harvard College in environmental geoscience, and an M.S. degree from MIT in earth, atmospheric, and planetary science. Jonathan has also worked as a researcher at Caltech, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, MIT and Harvard. He has published articles in major journals on electronics, computational biophysics and planetary evolution.

bob groppo, vp engineering

Prior to joining OQO in 2007, Bob was a senior fellow at Flextronics reporting to the CTO and responsible for driving engineering aspects for new ODM initiatives and component businesses within the Flextronics business units. Bob's responsibilities at Flextronics covered Mobile Handset and Consumer Digital business units, including driving platform hardware and software architectures, building and mentoring global engineering organizations, and establishing and driving engineering best practices and tools. Over his tenure, Bob has worked on smartphones, digital still cameras and camera modules, portable media players, wireless modules, and various computing platforms.

Bob has 20+ years of experience working on PC systems including mainstream desktop, notebook, appliance and server platforms. His experience ranges from chip level and system level architecture work (Intel, Momenta, Microcenter/WinBook, Power Computing) to high availability, scalable server designs (Sun). At Intel, Bob was first manager of the Intel Mobile Lab and led a team responsible for defining mobile CPU architecture. As a consultant, Bob worked on a variety of embedded systems ranging from set-top box designs, streaming servers and clients as well as storage servers.

nick merz, vp of design

Prior to co-founding OQO, Nick worked in the Apple Portable Product Design group. He engineered the media bays on Apple's Powerbook G3 Bronze, took the laptop through mass production, and was a key member of the team for the G4 Titanium Powerbook, from conception through early engineering builds. His professional engineering experience ranges from tooling design for radio telescope dishes, to the invention and development of demolition equipment, disposable dishware, and stereo photography equipment.

Nick has four patents pending from his work on the Titanium G4 display, two from the OQO model 01, and one from personal projects. Nick holds a B.S. degree in Product Design from Stanford University.

andrew popell, founder & CEO

Prior to co-founding OQO, Andrew founded several companies, including Keynote Systems (KEYN), where he was the VP of Marketing, and Harvest Technology, a financial software company where he was the COO. Previously, Andrew was in charge of marketing for two vertical industry sales groups at Oracle Corporation. Andrew is a partner at Olive Hill Investment Partners, a venture capital firm investing in seed-stage technology firms.

Andrew holds an A.B. degree from Harvard College and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

bob rosin, svp sales and marketing

Prior to joining OQO in 2002, Bob Rosin was founder and president of Bang Networks, Inc, a provider of networking technologies enabling enterprises to develop and deploy real-time web applications. Previously, Bob was Program Manager at Sony Corporation in Tokyo and in California, where he was responsible for product planning and strategy for Sony's interactive set-top box products, and managed the WebTV™ Internet Terminal product line. He holds eight patents related to network technologies.

Bob holds a B.A. degree from Cornell University and an M.B.A from Harvard Business School, where he won the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He has earned certificates in Japanese language from Keio University, Stanford University, and the Japanese government.