Playing Field

Some of the country's leading MSOs -- including Bright House, Cablevision, Charter, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable -- announced the launch of a joint venture, Canoe Ventures, created to make their growing suite of advanced advertising solutions easier to buy, use and measure. Canoe Ventures will be led by advertising industry veteran David Verklin. He joins Canoe Ventures effective August 4 and will drive the creation of shared processes and standards for more robust audience targeting, interactivity and measurement in multi-platform advertising across cable ops' systems throughout the country. Integra5 appointed Gene Lew VP of products and strategy. Before joining Integra5, he served as VP of IP advanced technology for international directory services provider NeuStar. John (J.C.) Murphy was named president and CEO of Cedar Point Communications. He succeeds Curt Hockemeier, who was named interim CEO in January. Hockemeier will remain on the company's board of directors. Dan Ambauen was named as VP of sales and support for North America at Scopus Video Networks. Ambauen has worked for MSOs such as Cox, Jones Intercable, Viacom and Intermedia Partners, serving in top engineering and technical operations roles. He spent the past 13 years with Harmonic, most recently serving as its VP North America cable sales. The SCTE Foundation Board of Directors added four new members: Chris Bowick of Cox, Jim Hughes of CommScope, Mike LaJoie of Time Warner Cable and Ken Wright of ARRIS. The Foundation's primary mission is to provide expanded educational opportunities for SCTE members to assist them in their professional development within cable and telecommunications engineering.