Summary
Klaus Hofrichter is a passionate Head of Engineering and Executive with 17 years of experience managing cross-functional teams including user experience design, device software, cloud services and hardware. He is known for rapidly move products from ideation to market release and operation for many platforms such as mobile, cloud, consumer electronics, and PlayStation.
Klaus joined Everyone Counts in San Diego as VP Product Engineering in October 2015, managing a growing engineering team working on SaaS based election solutions. The products include online voting, voter registration, and electronic poll book. Previously, Klaus established Skylar LLC in April 2015, a company to help small and large clients with innovation and productization of consumer-facing services and devices. Before that, Klaus served at Sony Electronics in San Diego in various roles, most recently as Senior VP of Engineering. In that role, he was overseeing a cross functional team supporting many Sony business units and related products (TV, Blu-Ray Player, Mobile, Game Console, Wearable, Network Services) with software and hardware development, partner engineering, innovation/trendscouting, and user experience design. Before that, Klaus was Director at Sony Computer Entertainment (aka PlayStation) to contribute to PS2 and PS3 platform components. Earlier he was at Sony Electronics in San Jose as an individual contributor and eventually General Manager. Klaus was also co-founder of TwonkyVision, a bootstrap startup in Germany developing media presentation and server software. TwonkyVision was successfully acquired by Packet Video in 2006.
Klaus is named inventor on 31 patents, 14 of which are issued. The main areas of inventions are home networking, interactive applications, content metadata generation and metadata usage.
Career Highlights
Everyone Counts, San Diego, 2015 – 2017
VP Product Engineering
Skylar LLC, San Diego, CA, 2015 – present
Founder
- Entrepreneur in Residence at Connect Springboard, Mentor at EvoNexus, Mentor at Qualcomm Robotics Accelerator
- Advisor to Petwireless.com
Sony Electronics, San Diego, CA, 2007 – 2015
Senior VP Engineering, 2013-2015
VP Software Engineering, 2007-2013
- Usability Testing Group
- Watch Now
- Sony 4K Experience
- Fitness Portal on TV
- 2nd Gen. Google-TV
- Dreamhouse
- Socialize on BDP
- Advertisement on TV/BDP
- Developer.sony.com
- 1st Gen. Google TV
- Dash
- Yahoo Widget on BRAVIA
- BRAVIA Internet Video
- IPTV Service Operation
Sony PlayStation, Foster City, CA, 2004 – 2007
Director
Sony Electronics, San Jose, CA, 1999 – 2004
Various individual contributor and management roles up to Director
Co-Founder TwonkyVision, 2000
GMD FOKUS, Germany (Berlin), 1991 – 1999
Various roles up to Department Vice Chair