Prashanth HirematadaPrashanth Hirematada, is the founder of Gamantra, a game technology company focused on Network engine & server platform. Prior to founding Gamantra in 2006, he was a Chief Architect at Shanda Interactive Entertainment Ltd., where he was responsible fr creating a common game development platform for all MMOG initiatives at Shanda. He joined Shanda in 2004 through Shanda's acquisition of Zona, Inc., an MMOG game technology company, headquartered in Santa Clara, USA. At Zona, as a Technical Chief Architect, he was responsible for server-side architecture and implementation of MMOG framework. Prior to joining Zona in 2001, Prashanth worked in various Silicon Valley-based technology start-up companies developing software at various levels for well over 7 years. His Master's thesis was about a distributed implementation of the Message Passing Library (MPI) on a heterogeneous network of workstations including Solaris, HP-UX, OpenStep, and Windows NT. He received his MS in Computer Science, from the California State University, Sacramento, California, in 1994 and his BS in Computer Science, from Bangalore University, Bangalore, India in 1992. He can be contacted at prash@gamantra.com. Read More Read Less