Beverly May is the President, Founder and Principal Consultant at Oxford Technology Ventures. Beverly is a focused and creative leader in technology strategy and product development, with over 15 years’ experience in managerial and leadership roles and 13 years’ experience in technology. She has also helped well over 100 clients of all sizes create compelling and impactful online businesses and digital products and services, from start-up consumer mobile apps to blue-chip transaction and information portals.
Beverly is an expert in User Experience and Usability. However, Beverly’s real value-added is her diverse range of experience that spans strategy and general management, technology development, operations management, brand marketing, journalism, graphic design, as well as hands-on roles across the full software development lifecycle.
Beverly first became involved in the Internet in 1996. In the 1990′s, she worked for and helped to launch a half-dozen start-ups, including an extended residency at an Internet company incubator in Toronto from 1998-2000. She also helped found a boutique media graphic design agency in 1997 – one of the first integrated print and digital agencies in Toronto.
While consulting in the early-mid 2000s in New York, Beverly held engagements at most of the major New York Interactive agencies, including R/GA, iDeutsch, Euro (Havas), and Atmosphere BBDO, working on many prestigious clients, including Nike, Nike Gridiron, MCI, Con Edison, Schwab, the Art Institutes, AOL, Diageo, and many more. Her projects at R/GA won a Cannes Silver Medal, One Show Interactive and AIGA Annual Design awards.
Beverly’s also has extensive pure software and technology experience. In 2002-2003, she led all user experience documentation and requirements gathering and definition for over a dozen large-scale, global enterprise applications with the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations. All UN applications were fully custom in-house initiatives and spanned HR management, help desk management, communications and workflow management, data warehouses, financial decision support systems, web portal sand more.
In 2004-2005, Beverly led the Data Services platform team at Wireless Generation, a fast-growing mobile applications educational software company that powers elementary school reading and math assessments at most US public schools. Wireless Generation was sold to News Corp. in 2010 to lead News Corp’s new education initiative at a price for over $400 million- the largest technology exit in NYC startup history. While at Wireless Generation, Beverly grew, managed and led the Data Services department from a team of 5 to 20 people as the company’s user base tripled to over a million users in less than a year. This multi-faceted role included creating all requirements, specifications and wireframes, as well as full-lifecycle product management for a suite of ten data-driven products and services that ranged from internal tools to custom integrations and complex client-facing data-management and reporting applications.
Beverly also has extensive experience in online publishing. Prior to founding Oxford Technology Ventures, LLC, Beverly helped the book and magazine publisher Rodale overhaul their signature magazine brand websites to generate up to 800% increases in site traffic, user retention and advertising revenue through new features and functionality, usability initiatives and large-scale redesigns. Her contributions at Rodale earned her a prestigious CEO Star Award, given annually to a nominated top-performing 1% of the company, and her enterprise site redesigns of Runnersworld.com and Prevention.com won several industry awards, including a General Excellence “Ellie” from the American Society of Magazine Editors, a 2nd Place for Website of the Year, and Best Online Tool, both by the Magazine Publishers of America (MPA).
Beverly also has had a long career in journalism, business and technology writing. Aside from founding and growing her own music and culture magazine in the mid-1990s, Beverly has had a chapter featured in the Routledge academic anthology African American Music: An Introduction and has written dozens of features for both academic journals and general culture magazines. In 2000, Beverly also researched and wrote NRG Shift for a Canadian Internet incubator, which was a new-economy strategy and future scenarios book about the demographics and cultural impact of the first wave of Internet adoption.
In addition to management, user experience, design and writing experience, Beverly also has hands- on development experience in software and new media, including Java, JSP, Visual Basic, SQL, HTML, XML, Actionscript, C and more from various positions. This mix of business, design and technology expertise allows her to add the greatest value to her clients through an integrated, comprehensive and multi-faceted business approach to each problem.
Lastly, Beverly began her career at age 20 by co-founding her own successful music entertainment company and independent music magazine in Toronto, Canada. She produced or co-produced over 25 music and entertainment events from 1994-2000, each with attendance to 2500 people per event. These events averaged 90-100% advance sales and typically sold out, based on a pre-Internet physical mailing list that Beverly and her company’s partners created and grew from scratch to over 3000 active members. During this period, Beverly and her partners pushed the limits of experimental electronic music, multimedia and arts in Toronto. The companies partnered with larger organizations like Creative Time and the JVC Jazz Festival in New York, as well as hired and worked with many of the premiere electronic and popular visual and multimedia artists, musicians and DJs of the era, including Orbital, members of the Orb, Autechre, Plastikman, Scanner, Mark Farina, Derrick Carter, members of Underground Resistance, Dubtribe, Jazzanova, Ron Trent, Carl Craig, Theorem, Speedy J, various members of Chain Reaction, Pole, Wunmi, Osunlade, Gilles Peterson, King Britt, Sylk 130 live, Liquid Soul, Nightmares on Wax, Fred Everything, and many more. As a woman operating in a predominantly male industry, she was also featured or interviewed for over two dozen radio, TV, magazine and book publications.
Beverly received a Bachelor’s degree with High Achievement in English and Philosophy at University of Toronto, a Master’s Degree in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University with a focus in computer systems design, and an Executive MBA from Oxford University, with a focus on General Management and Finance. In 2000, she also spent a semester in the Design and Technology MFA Program at Parsons School of Design. Beverly is a triple US, Canadian and EU citizen and currently lives in New York.
Contact Beverly by email, or on LinkedIn, or on Twitter: her Personal Twitter @BevMayBe and UX Related OTV Twitter @OxfordTech. You can also watch her YouTube interview on behalf of Oxford’s Executive MBA Programme, or watch the Vimeo footage of the first User Experience Awards.