GT&A Strategic Marketing Inc. is a marketing, branding, strategy, communications, content
development, and startup advisory consulting firm. The company's Founder & President is Graeme Thickins.
The firm has worked with more than 100 successful emerging technology firms over two decades,
including many successful Internet and e-business firms since 1995. Particular areas
of recurring focus have been storage, networking, software, and IT services.

GT&A was founded in 1982 to serve the unique needs of startup and emerging technology firms,
evolving to serve companies of all sizes, most business-to-business but some consumer. Its focus has
always been new-product or new-venture launches, often working with founding teams from the concept stage.
In addition, we've taken on certain special interim assignments. One example: GT&A founder Graeme Thickins
was active in helping BestBuy.com -- the e-commerce initiative of the world's largest electronics retailer --
start up and build its new world-class web site. As part of the initial launch team, he served as acting Content
Director and helped establish site specifications and design, while also playing a role in building the
e-publishing organization from 3 to 75 people in four months. The site was launched in June 2000.
Six months later, it became a top-10 online shopping site, as measured by Nielsen//Net Ratings.
It was also ranked third in the Forrester Research "Power Rankings," behind number two
Amazon.com, and has been named one of Top 50 Properties on the Internet. As of early
2006, the site's revenue run-rate reached more than $ 1 billion per year,
and its annual sales now well exceed that figure.

In addition to his consulting and editorial/content development business, GT&A founder
Graeme Thickins has written extensively on business and marketing developments related to technology
and the Knowledge Economy. He has a large national network of leaders and influentials in the technology
and investment communities. His popular email reports on Internet and technology developments, begun
as a sideline in 1997, were read by a large audience of company founders, VCs, and technology executives.
These reports grew out of Graeme's frequent travel to major technology conferences nationwide. As
a result, he was invited in 1999 to contribute on a regular basis to the Internet's most
respected technology-conference intelligence site, Conferenza.com.

Graeme's writings have also appeared in several other publications, including
leading storage-networking site Byte and Switch, Tidalwire's award-winning "Storage
Connection" site (before its acquisition by Network Engines), IDG's Darwin Magazine and its sister publication,
CIO Magazine, Business 2.0 Magazine, Storewidth.com (a Gilder Publishing site), the newsletter of
LARTA, the Technology Alliance for Southern California, eWeek,
Computerworld, and many others.

Graeme had also served as an advisor to several startup technology
firms, and has an alternate base of operation in Southern California.

His focus in branding, including naming and domain strategy, grew out of
extensive involvement earlier in his career in building brand equity in
and managing many major brands. He served in marketing communications
management positions with such leading Fortune 500 corporations as
Medtronic and the former Control Data Corporation. As an account
executive with then top-10 worldwide agency D'Arcy-MacManus
& Masius, he also worked on multimillion dollar
advertising campaigns for the 3M Company.

Since 2005, Graeme has written a personal blog called Tech~Surf~Blog, focused
primarily on innovation and entrepreneurship. In 2007, he launched a second blog for
GT&A's new media practice, called NewMediaWise.com. More information about Graeme
and his networks is available at his LinkedIn profile and his Facebook page.