Well-financed P2P TV platform Babelgum is seeking a new chief technology officer after the departure of its second senior member in two months. We have confirmed with Babelgum in Milan that CTO Mallku Caballero left the outfit around a month ago; the company refused to give a reason.
Caballero told paidContent:UK today: ”Let’s just say that I did not fully adhere to the vision and to the management style brought in by the new CEO.” Valerio Zingarelli replaced co-founder and CEO Erik Lumer as top dog in July, prompting Lumer to take a back seat before quitting the company altogether in October to become CEO of RawFlow.
Though Babelgum is headquartered in Dublin, Caballero worked from Nice. His bio has now been removed from the site and an ad has gone out for a replacement in “no preferred location”, although a majority of time would be spent in Nice. Notable from Caballero’s previous experience - he was chief scientist at White Pine Software, the maker of CUSeeMe, an early webcam conferencing application. He is now “exploring the feasibility of a venture in the software-as-a-service domain, unrelated to media and content”, he said.
Zingarelli said in October: “The final version (of Babelgum) will be much more advanced and sophisticated and very easy to use.” That may speak to the disagreement Caballero hinted at, or it may just be stating the obvious as Babelgum has been in beta since March.
Founded in 2005 and often compared with Joost, Babelgum has a potential 350 million euros (£252 million) in funding available from Italian telco billionaire Silivo Scaglia, according to earlier reports - 220 million euros (£158 million) from the sale of a 6.3 percent stake in the Fastweb broadband supplier he co-founded and a further 130 million euros (£93 million) he expects from Fastweb dividends.
