Mason Announces Strategic Advisory Board to Drive Innovation in Dedicated Smart Devices

Committee of Top Industry Leaders to Support Company's Development Agenda in Target Verticals including Healthcare

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mason, innovator of the only fully managed infrastructure for developing and delivering dedicated smart devices, today announced the Mason Advisory Board, comprised of industry thought leaders and investors, as well as co-founders and C-suite members of top tech unicorns such as Cruise, Twitch, Tinder and Lookout. The Board will help shape and guide Mason’s platform development, hiring and growth strategies as the company grows its business while disrupting the enterprise mobility, MDM and enterprise hardware space. Mason also announced the addition of an industry-specific advisory board for healthcare to provide insights and guidance on go-to-market plays, networking and product direction.

“Mason is at the forefront of the bespoke smart device revolution in the enterprise. Our mission is to build smart and sustainable products on behalf of humanity, starting in heavily-regulated industries such as healthcare that take time for innovation to seed and grow,” said Jim Xiao, founder and CEO of Mason. “We value our advisory board of industry leaders that provides the guidance and sounding board to navigate highly-regulated industries that could benefit greatly from innovation. Forming industry-specific advisory boards gives us a faster way to impact rising stars in those spaces while providing a platform for advisors to share insights across verticals. The cross-fertilization of knowledge is what we’re betting on to speed up adoption of technology at the edge.”

New Mason Advisory Board members include:

• John Thimsen, CTO, Qualtrics: John oversees the global systems, security and engineering teams responsible for building the Qualtrics Experience Management Platform. He is an expert in building large-scale, web-based products that impact millions of users, including recommendation systems, consumer hardware and e-commerce products. Before he joined Qualtrics, John spent 10 years leading engineering teams at Amazon where he was most recently the Head of Engineering building the Alexa service. Prior to Amazon, he worked at Microsoft, Active Voice Corporation, and Openwave Systems.
• Mahesh Gupta, Director, Innovation Engineering at Delta Airlines: Mahesh is a thought leader in fostering innovation and transforming workforces into a high-performing team. Mahesh’s team created the award-winning Fly Delta app to enhance customer experience. His leadership incubated the Enterprise Mobility practice at Delta and enhanced frontline employees's capabilities with mobile solutions built around human-centric design. Mahesh is passionate about bringing cutting-edge technology into the enterprise to improve the experience for customers and employees alike. In his most recent role, Mahesh drove innovation through artificial intelligence, machine learning and intelligent automation. Mahesh’s mission is to transform teams to create a deep connection with what they do on a daily basis and experience fulfillment and happiness.

Mason Healthcare Advisory Board Ignites Innovation in Digital Health

Made up of top professionals in the healthcare space, the healthcare advisory board delivers access to key stakeholders with the most pressing problems, especially as COVID-19 has reset much of how healthcare views remote patient care. Advisors who have been involved in leveraging technology adoption to drive digital transformation for millions of patients and staff in the healthcare industry will help position Mason at the forefront of the digital health revolution. Mason provides the underlying infrastructure to collect, dispense and connect critical data and systems. These technological advancements will power the development of smart devices that can bring life-saving medicine to market faster and improve patient and staff experiences.

Mason Healthcare Advisory Board members include:

• Ed Collins, Healthcare Technology Veteran: Ed is a healthcare technology veteran and has served as the chief information officer at a variety of top hospitals across the nation including Martin Health System and United Hospital Center. His work has been focused on improving patient care, optimizing patient and staff experiences, and health information management via technology planning and adoption. He is currently serving as the associate chief information officer at one of the most prestigious healthcare organizations in the world.
• Chris Coburn, Chief Innovation Officer, Mass General Brigham: Mass General Brigham is an integrated healthcare system that consists of Harvard University affiliates Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Eye and Ear, and McLean Hospital. As CIO of the nation’s largest academic research enterprise, Chris leads a team of more than 140 tasked with business development responsibilities including investing, company creation, international consulting, innovation management, industry collaborations, and licensing. Prior to joining Mass General Brigham, Chris was founding director of Cleveland Clinic Innovations and served for 13 years as its executive leader. His team also managed an innovation alliance network in which Cleveland Clinic directly supported technology commercialization for healthcare systems throughout the United States. He has been a member of numerous corporate and community boards including Explorys (acquired by IBM), Autonomic Technologies, and the U.S. Enrichment Corporation (NYSE:USU).
• Daniel Nigrin, MD, CIO: Dr. Nigrin is an accomplished CIO with over two decades of experience leading information technology at multi-billion dollar healthcare provider organizations. He is board-certified in clinical informatics and pediatric endocrinology, and practiced clinically for over 30 years.
• Patrick Fortune, Healthcare Technology Veteran: Patrick has extensive experience in healthcare IT generally and in the application of IT in R&D, including the design and execution of clinical trials for therapeutics, diagnostics and medical devices. This experience includes both development and use in roles including director/executive management in the pharmaceutical industry, the medical device industry and CRO industry.

Mason’s mission is to start revolutions across industries by empowering innovators to build smart devices to improve humanity and make software delivery on a smart product line—whether it’s a tablet, wearable or new form factor—as simple as delivering software in the cloud. The team’s passion for creating technology to solve real world problems fuels the development of technological innovations to bring hundreds of use cases to market without reinventing the wheel.

Supporting Quotes

John Thimsen, CTO, Qualtrics

"My career in technology has been focused on building platforms and products that impact tens of millions of customers. I consider my work with the Mason team a continuation of that theme; the platform they are building will transform the way that digital devices are built and delivered to customers."

Ed Collins, Healthcare Technology Veteran

“Mason is transforming the way we have traditionally acquired and deployed technology in the healthcare space. This new model of delivery opens opportunities to bring cutting edge technologies to the forefront much more rapidly and cost effectively than in the past. The limitless partnership opportunities and speed to market gives Mason a tremendous opportunity to lead the way in reshaping an industry that is rapidly altering its delivery model to become more consumer centric after sustaining severe disruption over the past year with the management of a global pandemic.”

Daniel Nigrin, MD, CIO

“Mason provides an interesting opportunity for healthcare organizations to obtain purpose-built solutions, inclusive of both hardware and software, to address their unique needs not otherwise satisfied by commercial offerings. Being able to play an advisory role in this platform’s development is a unique and exciting opportunity!”

Patrick Fortune, Healthcare Technology Veteran

“Clinical trials are on the critical path of enabling life saving or life extending drugs and devices to reach large numbers of patients. Such trials involve collecting a large volume of data in accordance with carefully designed protocols. Products and technology that have the potential to favorably and materially impact the cost, quality and timeliness of such trials will facilitate the development of such drugs and devices.”

About Mason

Mason is the fastest way to take smart devices from idea to end user. Whether building a single-use device from scratch or scaling a line of smart products, with Mason it’s 20x faster and 10x less costly to build, deploy and scale. Digital transformation is a modern requirement but operating a hardware-dependent initiative is hard – thousands of hours and millions of dollars are at stake. The Mason Smart Device Platform is the only fully managed infrastructure for developing and delivering dedicated devices. It offers flexible usage-based pricing for fleets of devices and manages the underlying complexity of all associated backend services, making software delivery on a smart product line—whether it’s a tablet, wearable or new form factor—as simple as delivering software in the cloud. This frees innovators to focus on what matters: application development, feature specification and UX. Granular access to add, remove or lock down capabilities makes it possible for highly customized products to be built as envisioned. Mason offloads hardware investment risks and logistics, including inventory procurement, warehousing and supply chain management. With options like zero-touch provisioning, devices work perfectly out of the box without end user intervention. Remote fleet management, troubleshooting and automated software updates by Mason ensure security and positive end user experiences. Organizations of all sizes rely on Mason to bring innovations and hundreds of use cases to market without reinventing the wheel. Smarter from start to finish with Mason.™

Pam Njissang
Bhava Communications for Mason
510.214.3436
mason@bhavacom.com