MANAGEMENT TEAM

• Prof. Christos Nikolaou, Non-Executive Chairman
• Dimitris Tsigos, Group CEO
• Evangelos Zeginoglou, Group Business Development Director
• Ioannis Makriyannis, Group CFO
• Andrew Hughes, Country Manager – Virtual Trip Spain SL
• Aris Salmon-Alavanos, General Manager – Infomap SA
• Giorgos Dramitinos, Services Director – VIRTUAL TRIP Ltd
• Fotis Liotopoulos, RTD Director – VIRTUAL TRIP Ltd
• Athanasios Papagelis, Technical Director – EPIGNOSIS Ltd
• Manos Moschous, Technical Director – MVNS SA
• Andreas Stefanidis, Non-Executive Director

Prof. Christos Nikolaou, Non-Executive Chairman

Christos Nikolaou is a Professor of the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete in Heraklion, Crete, Greece. He received a Diploma in Mechanical and Electrical Engineering in 1979 from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, an MSc degree in Applied Mathematics in 1979 and a PhD degree in Applied Mathematics in 1982, both from Harvard University, USA.
Nikolaou has recently worked as a strategist, an administrator who promotes innovation, and as an educator and researcher. He is seeking new opportunities for cooperation and/or employment as a strategist, a business developer (especially in the high technology sector) or a researcher for applied R&D in the Informatics and Communications Technology (ICT) area.
Christos Nikolaou’s Specialties:
High-tech R&D policy and planning, management of large organizations, business and R&D projects development, e-business, business process transformation.

Dimitris Tsigos, Group CEO

Dimitris Tsigos received his diploma in Computer Science from the Department of Computer Science, University of Crete, in January 2001 and his MBA from the Athens University of Economics and Business, Department of Management Science and Technology, in December 2005. In 1998 he was guest researcher at the Computational Vision and Active Perception Laboratory of the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. In 1999 and 2000, he was a member of the Networks and Telecommunications Group of the Institute of Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology, Hellas.

Mr. Tsigos was one of the founders of VIRTUAL TRIP Ltd, in September 2000. In November 2003, he co-founded EPIGNOSIS Ltd, the vendor of the “eFront” e-learning platform, and in November 2005 he became major shareholder & Managing Director of Infomap SA, the leading Greek GIS solutions provider, proceeding to the creation of V.Trip Group.

Dimitris Tsigos has been nominated the Special Prize of the University of Crete for Continues Entrepreneurial Development, and has been elected member of the board of the Hellenic Association of ICT Professionals.

Evangelos Zeginoglou, Group Business Development Director

Mr Zegkinoglou has a BSc. In Electrical & Electronic Engineering (Computer Technical Engineering) at Portsmouth University, UK. Positions hold:
"AMBER Computer Company", a daughter company of the group of AGET HERCULES cement factory. 1974 – 1978 Digital Computer Engineer and from 1978 – 1983 Support Supervisor : From 1983 – 1985, Technical Supervisor: Hired from Hewlett Packard in the International branch office in Athens, Greece to install and support big computer site installations in the Middle East area.
Supervise a team of technical computer engineers, to install and support computer systems according to the sales instructions and customer requirements.
Arrange stock of spares to be sent at customer site and be sufficient for the support of the system installation. Responsible for all necessary paper work needed for shipping licence and custom clearence for in & out of the country. 1985 – 1992 Customer Support Manager:  Establish of the Greek branch for the local business, to include all sections of the products (business computers, peripherals, calculators, measurement instruments, analytical instruments & medical equipment).
Responsible to organise, develop and run support business in Greece on a profitable manner and customer satisfaction. "SUN MICROSYSTEMS Inc":1992 – 1996, Customer Support manager: Responsible to organise, develop and run the support business in the area, on a profit / loss mode and customer satisfuction mentality. 1996 – 1998, Business Development manager: Develop business in SEAME area. Recognise business opportunities, propose solutions and organise subsidiary offices to begin local business, as well as to support near-by countries with less business activities by selecting the right channels. 1998 – 2001 Director for SEAME (Southern Europe, Africa, Middle East) Responsible for the support business of 42 Countries with 5 direct subsidiary offices (Greece, Turkey, Israel, South Africa and Kazakstan) and dealer channel on the other countries. Total budget of about $50 M and direct employee 62 local staff. "TUV AUSTRIA HELLAS": Business Development Manager. Responsible to develop business for the Group on the public sector and help expanding business abroad on a total IT solutions.Undertake and implement an EU project to install and networking all secondary schools of Cyclade islands with computers & peripherals to access public libraries of the Country.
"MEGAPART" Automotive spare partsQ Responsible for the start up of the company, organising the construction for the warehouse to facilitate spares, as well as the working space (offices). Contacting manufactures abroad and negotiating T&C’s for representation of their firms in the Greek market. Importing spares and organise sales force to start business in the aftermarket automotive sector in Greece.

Ioannis Makriyannis, Group CFO

Andrew Hughes, Country Manager – Virtual Trip Spain SL

Aris Salmon-Alavanos, General Manager – Infomap SA

Giorgos Dramitinos, Services Director – VIRTUAL TRIP Ltd

Mr. Dramitinos was born in Crete, Greece in 1972. He received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees in Computer Science from the University of Crete in 1994 and 1996, respectively.
From 1993 to 1996 he was a Research Assistant at the Institute of Computer Science, Foundation for Research and Technology Hellas in Crete, Greece contributing to the ESPRIT SHIPS project. His work was focused on micro-kernel operating system development using the Mach OS and on the development of a remote memory paging system using a local area network’s ram as a fault-tolerant paging device under Digital Unix. During the summer of 1994 he worked as a systems engineer at Advanced Computer Research Institute in Lyon, France contributing to the development of the OSF/1-based operating system for the company’s supercomputer by designing and developing a memory filesystem on top of UFS and a serial line device driver. He also contributed to the development of microcode (PALcode) used to control one of the supercomputer’s Alpha processors.
In 1996 he was a senior systems engineer at Global Enterprise Technologies Corp., Boston, MA, USA where he designed and developed a device driver for a special SCSI passport printer used for passport production in the US and in many other countries under SCO Unix.
From 1998 to 2001 he worked in GET group owned companies in Dubai, UAE as a senior systems engineer and in Athens, Greece as head of the R&D department. He designed and developed device drivers for the passport printer under MS Windows. He also designed and developed part of a passport issuing system using Visual C++ and Oracle.
From 2001 to 2006 he worked for ISD SA, Athens, Greece as technical director acting as a system architect for the company’s products. His work addressed a wide range of activities, such as embedded operating system development for consumer electronics Systems on Chip, low level communication protocol development, network processor design and simulation, real time, pixel synchronized multi-source video capturing system design etc.
Since 2006 he has joined Virtual Trip Ltd as the Services Department Director designing and coordinating large scale IT projects both for the public and the private sector. 
His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, computer architecture and computer networks. Parts of his work have been published in refereed international journals (Academic Press) and conferences (Usenix, IEEE).

Fotis Liotopoulos, RTD Director, RTD Director – VIRTUAL TRIP Ltd.

Dr. Fotis K. Liotopoulos received his diploma in Computer Engineering from the Univ. of Patras, Greece, in 1988 and his M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from the Computer Sciences and Electrical & Computer Engineering dept. of the Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, in 1991 and 1996, respectively.
He has worked with the Research Academic Computer Technology Institute (RACTI) as a senior research engineer, research-unit manager and consultant for several public and private sector projects. He has also served as a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer for CITY College, a private higher education institution, affiliated with the Univ. of Sheffield, where he taught graduate (M.Sc.) and undergraduate courses in Computer Networks and Computer Architecture. Dr. Liotopoulos has taught Computer Architecture at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki as a PD407 adjunct lecturer and he has been a part-time teaching associate with the Hellenic Open University for the past 6 years, teaching graduate and undergraduate courses in Computer Architecture, Digital Systems and Computer Networks.
Currently, Dr. Liotopoulos is the Director of the R&TD dept. of Virtual Trip, Ltd., supervising a research group of 8 people and managing more than 15 ongoing R&TD projects (national and EU). During the past 20 years, he has managed or participated in several dozens of ICT R&TD projects in his areas of expertise.
Dr. Liotopoulos is the author or co-author of more than 30 research papers and has served as a reviewer and/or committee member for several international journals, conferences and books. He has been awarded a "best-paper award" (PARLE conf.), Vilas and Bodosakis fellowships and a number of distinctions and awards for research and academic performance. His areas of interest include computer and network architectures and protocols, digital communications, broadband switching and routing, parallel & distributed architectures, multiprocessor / multicomputer systems, parallel processing and performance analysis & optimization.
Dr. Liotopoulos is a senior member of IEEE and member of ACM. He has also been a member of the British Computing Society, the Sigma-Chi Engineering Society, member of several IEEE Technical Committees TCCSR, TCCA, TCSA, and member of the Editorial Board of the "Wireless Communications & Mobile Computing" Journal (Wiley & Sons).

Athanasios Papagelis, Technical Director, Technical Director – EPIGNOSIS Ltd

Athanasios Papaggelis was born in 1975 in Edessa, Greece. He has a degree and MSC from the Department of Computer Engineering and Informatics of University of Patras. He has a rich research activity (more than 20 published works on international conferences and IT magazines). He has worked on the Institute of Computer Technology as a Researcher (1998-2000) and various other companies as a software architect since 2000. He is a founding member and one of the two basic stockholders of EPIGNOSIS LTD, in which he is Technical Supervisor since 2004. His interests include web technologies, eLearning, machine learning and efficient organization of remote workgroups.

Manos Moschous, Technical Director, Technical Director – MVNS SA

Manos Moschous was born in Rhodes in 1980. He graduated from the computer science department of University of Crete in 2003 and received his master degree from the same department 2 years later in 2005. From
2005 to 2007 he had the position of staff member to the Distributed Computing Systems Laboratory while he participated in many research industrial projects. He is a founding member and one of the two basic stockholders of MVISION NETWORK SOLUTIONS SA, in which he is Technical Director.
Its business interests include the technical design and development of Value Added Services for Service Providers companies (e.g Internet Service Providers, Mobile Operators, AudioText firms, Content Providers, etc.). Its technical background centers around the content adaptation and multimedia streaming delivery both to mobile devices based on the pervasive 3GPP standards and commodity PC’s based on web standards.
Another area of interest is the utilization of personalization techniques for web content in order to provide universal access even for handheld devices with limited capabilities.
Last two years, he has the position of technical director in mVision network solution SA. He has acquired great experience on management of products and business development. During this period he has developed many contacts with companies proving technology of Service Providers including Packet Video Network Solutions – Alcatel, Envivio, Dicas, Real Networks, Axis, Sorenson, Autotools, qbrick, n-video, media excel, NEC, Vodafone, Cosmote, Forthnet, OTENET, Infoquest, Velti, Win, TIM, OTE, eurotel, dionic, gamers, etc.

Andreas Stefanidis , Non-Executive Director

Andreas Stefanidis received his BSc in Accounting & Economics from the STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK, NEW PALTZ and he is partially qualified Chartered Management Accountant from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants – CIMA. Mr. Stefanidis is the President of the Hellenic Association of Young Entrepreneurs in Athens, and the General Secretary of the Federation of Hellenic Associations of Young Entrepreneurs - OESYNE, (www.esyne.gr). OESYNE is the National member of the European Confederation of Young Entrepreneurs, YES for Europe. (www.yesforeurope.eu). He is also the founder and Managing Director of the HELLENIC MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING CENTRE, (www.helmac.eu).

In 2007, Mr. Stefanidis founded a Non – for – Profit organization, the Academy of Entrepreneurship, in order to offer short specialized courses to innovative young entrepreneurs of Greece and the surrounding countries of the Balkans and Turkey. The Academy of Entrepreneurship is supported by the Educational Association of Athens, “Hfaistos”, founded in 1935.

Andreas Stefanidis has been teaching Financial, Managerial and Cost Accounting courses at New York College Group of Companies since 1995 and also at the State University of New York at New Paltz since 2004 as a visiting faculty. He has been offering vocational seminars in Entrepreneurship and Management Accounting to young entrepreneurs in Greece and other European countries.

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