Dan Reitan

Born March 29, 1960, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Dan Reitan is an American computer technology executive best known for his work in the application of Augmented Reality to television.
Biography
Reitan displayed interest and ability in mathematics, science and communications at an early age. When he was 10 years old, he interviewed Jim Klobuchar, a noted Minneapolis StarTribune journalist (and father of U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar). At eleven, Reitan won 1st prize at a science fair for his presentation on quantum mechanics. He won 1st and 2nd place in consecutive years as a High School Sophomore and Junior in National Math Test competition, and finished 4 semesters of Multivariable College Calculus the year prior to his graduation. He received a perfect math score on his SAT college entrance exams.
A classmate of Barack Obama while attending Occidental College on a National Merit Scholarship (and an Olson Memorial Scholarship), he participated in the Collegium scholarship program there and shared personal mentorship with the 44th President of the United States from Anne Howells, head of Oxy's English dept. He also attended some of the same anti-apartheid protest rallies against the school's questionable capital investments.
Augmented Reality Enhancement
Reitan’s early successes in the 1980s in the industrial automation of television included many original inventions, including the first application of augmented reality to TV while at Kavouras, Inc., a broadcast graphics system manufacturer and data service provider.
Reitan invented augmented reality based weather, news, and sports graphics technology and proprietary communications networks and satellite subcarrier feeds to deliver cutting-edge news, weather and sports broadcast television automation technology, including the invention of numerous original weather visualizations, many of which are still in use today.
Noted especially for the invention of "Color Weather Radar", Kavouras Inc. later became primarily a weather data service provider during the privatization of the U.S. National Weather Service.
While numerous TV stations and networks carried his work on-air, Reitan worked most directly with in Minneapolis, in St. Louis, and WGN TV in Chicago to invent and develop the cutting edge in automated broadcast graphics and video:
• At WCCO TV in Minneapolis, Reitan worked with Mike Fairborne and Mark Rosen, inventing original weather visualizations and designing then-cutting-edge on-air weather graphics and imaging and sports news automation. He also worked directly with Midwest Communications CEO Jim Rupp and WCCO Cable GM Bill Craig. Reitan built custom satellite router equipment to bridge proprietary networks, and invented the WCCO Weather Channel, a highly successful fully automated augmented reality based 24x7 weather channel, which captured 2nd place in Nielsen ratings for all cable channels in the Twin Cities (a major US TV market). Collaborating with Linda Peinovich, on-air personality and then news director of Satellite News & Information Channel (an early competitor to CNN), in the development of automated WCCO Weather Channel programming, he later teamed up with her to found Pegasus Productions, which spawned the successful TV show "Working on the Dream". Years later, the two combined again to found Channel CAT Corporation, an early Augmented Reality based Automated Television offering which they were ultimately unable to sell to Cable TV head-end operators and Minneapolis-based capital investors.
• At KSDK TV in St. Louis, Reitan worked directly with weathercaster Dave Murray in bringing KSDK TV into the modern computer electronics age, actually appearing on-the-air while he installed and configured the industrial electronics required to broadcast KSDK news shows. He programmed new television show features and behaviors on the set while redesigning and developing the first installation of a then cutting-edge computer-automated broadcast television weather graphics generation system.
• At WGN TV in Chicago, Reitan worked directly with News Director Paul Davis in the early superstation years, in support of Davis' building of the original superstation news operations. Reitan and Davis met repeatedly over the better part of a year at WGN TV in Chicago and at Reitan's office in Minneapolis to design and optimize equipment for WGN's emerging superstation operations. (Davis was later president of RTNDA - the Radio and Television News Directors Association for over a decade.)
At Micral, the company internationally recognized as the inventor of the personal computer, Reitan was a contributing engineer on many of their personal computers, including engineering team-lead on their 5th personal computer product. He was a direct report to Charles H. Smoot III (later to become Micral CEO), and met regularly with then-CEO of corporate owner Groupe Bull, Jacques Stern. Working with Bill Gates at Microsoft to establish their early products and helping to launch the Wintel X86 revolution, Reitan also worked closely with G. Gervaise Davis, noted authority on computer intellectual property law.
Reitan trained in process facilitation at , where he worked directly with Dr. M. Scott Peck (author of "The Road Less Travelled"), Gary Zukav (author of "The Seat of the Soul"), and Kaz Gozdz (author of "Community Building" and contributing author to "The New Paradigm in Business"). He was on the FCE advisory board. Reitan supplemented his cross-training at FCE with numerous other methodologies, from Rummler Brache to Native American sweat-lodge and fire-walk ceremonies, supplementing all with Organizational Development coursework at Metro State University in St. Paul, MN.
Reitan then moved from product invention, design and development to IT consulting, architecture and implementation - first as a workflow process consultant, then a cultural change management consultant, a global tools and technology consultant, and eventually designing, developing and implementing many global enterprise systems for Network Systems, Storage Tek, Control Data, Charles Schwab, The Associates, Citigroup, Intel, Cisco Systems, wine.com, Business Wire and many other Fortune 500 and start-up companies. These implementations included cutting-edge virtualization, SOA and Cloud-based enterprise systems.
In 2010, Reitan founded ReinCloud Corporation, along with cofounder Vladimir Rubashevsky, offering Big-Data-driven personalized and interactive augmented reality based automated television technology (AR-based-AT™), which enables interactive and personalized content and advertising for home and mobile viewers. In 2011, Reitan filed 2000 pages of provisional patents with the USPTO, and generated ½ million app downloads in the Android Market from proof-of-concept posts. In 2012, Reitan filed 15 utility patents in omnibus, with specifications supporting a pipeline of 60 additional patents. In 2013, Reitan entered ReinCloud’s 1st B2B product, ARGTV in TV Hackfest 2013, the premier international Next Gen TV technology competition, and won 1st place overall (“Best Overall Hack”), as awarded by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and CNN.
ReinCloud is located in Mountain View, CA.
Awards and Recognition
2013: Reitan speaks on the future of television in Business Week, The San Jose Mercury News, STL Today, and other news media outlets worldwide.
2013: 1st Place Overall (aka "Best Overall Hack") for Augmented Reality Gamification TV (a ReinCloud product) at TV Hackfest, an international Next Gen TV competition sponsored and judged by Google, Facebook, Twitter, CNN and others. Competition included major networks, carriers, studios, and tech companies.
2000: Reitan appointed to FCE advisory board with Scott Peck, Gary Zukav, and other luminaries
1987: Pan Am Ground Services (Johnson Controls): Reitan wins team award for product of the year as technology consultant to team.
1986: Groupe Bull: Reitan wins corporate excellence award for world's first custom-silicon accelerated X86 system design.
1984: Groupe Bull: Reitan wins corporate excellence award for world's first clean, high-performance X86 BIOS.
1984 - 1987: Micral: Reitan wins numerous, highly coveted "Big Buck Awards" for innovating competitive solutions to difficult design engineering problems.
1982: Reitan awarded for his role in taking Kavouras from 0% to 100% market share in the broadcast TV automated weather visualization market
1976-1978: National Math Test winner, National Merit Scholar, Olson Memorial Scholar, Collegium Scholar
Inventions
Reitan has invented dozens of successful enterprise and consumer products related to television, mobile devices, personal computers and embedded systems. They include:
<table>
<tr><td>• Several unique methods of anti-aliasing used in broadcast television and computer graphics.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st application of augmented reality to television programming automation</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st computerized color weather radar display system.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st true animation of color weather radar (digital video).</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st true composite video of multiple weather radar imaging sources</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st anti-aliased augmented reality based colorized stereoscopic weather satellite video generation</td></tr>
<tr><td>• Dozens of other original weather visualizations, still in use today</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st custom silicon accelerated X86.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st broadcast-quality digital video animation system</td></tr>
<tr><td>• One of the 1st MS DOS 1.0 ports.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• One of the 1st MS Windows 1.0 ports.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st software-accelerated X86 BIOS.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The first augmented reality based automated television programming channel generator</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The all-time highest ratings for a fully automated television programming channel.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• The 1st studio-quality X86 based digital audio editing system.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• Augmented Reality Gamification TV, an international award-winning "Next Gen TV" product (1st Place Overall, TV Hackfest 2013: "Best Overall Hack" - Google TV, Facebook, Twitter, CNN presiding)</td></tr>
<tr><td>• An original satellite TV subcarrier to land-line router / gateway for multi-feed automated TV support</td></tr>
<tr><td>• A hand-held densitometer for color-matching professional printing robotic ink mixing and printing system.</td></tr>
<tr><td>• A battery charger that repairs NiCad batteries during the charge cycle.</td></tr>
</table>
Patents
Reitan has authored dozens of patents related to augmented reality, embedded and distributed processing systems, and computer-based inter-personal and mass communications.
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