The SleekFly Team
Daniel Botbol
President & CEO
Mr. Daniel Botbol is an experienced business pioneer/entrepreneur, knowledgeable in all aspects of business management. Known as a leader that wholeheartedly believes in simple values and principles to guide people, Daniel focuses daily on overall company direction, new initiatives and business operations.
Mr. Botbol was a founding principal and Vice-President of Tampa based AT&T/Atlantic, a joint venture formed in 1992 by privately held Atlantic Business Communications and AT&T. The company grew substantially as a successful small business vendor/leader in telecom and telemarketing services. With a focus on service-oriented growth, Dan was key in managing the company to top annual revenue of 45M, 600 employees and 12 offices across the U.S. After 11 years of successful growth, the company was purchased by AT&T/Lucent in a mutually beneficial split.
Recognizing the opportunity of the Internet, Mr. Botbol established Swank Tank, a business development and web development company. Since its inception, Dan and the team at Swank Tank have created and grown several Internet based businesses, such as PEO Resources, Federal Firearm Laws, the Gun Ring social network and the innovative media site Sleekfly.
A clear gap in the availability of quickly accessible, briefly informative, image rich news, prompted Dan and his creative writing/development team to embark on an opportunity inspired quest to deliver the most exciting, interesting and entertaining news content and information available on the web today.
A love for news, a keen eye for opportunity, a unique ability to develop ideas, proven experience, and a humble desire to “change the world” are the key attributes that make Dan the right person to lead the Sleekfly team in its pursuit of Internet news publishing domination.
Mr. Botbol has a graduate degree in business from Florida International University.
Vince Heilman
Director of Online Services
Mr. Heilman has been professionally developing, designing, and managing web sites and online marketing projects since 1996. He has worked with all sizes of business, from simple brochure sites, online marketing campaigns, full blown enterprise level e-commerce sites, and Pulitzer Prize-winning National newspaper sites including The Gainesville Sun, Sarasota Herald Tribune, and others. Mr. Heilman leads the in house technical team dedicated to our systems, services and client support. Mr. Heilman has been an integral part of the development of in-house technical tools to help in the assessment of new client service providers.
Vince comes from The New York Times Company as an Online Producer in their Regional Media Group, a group that consists of 15 award-winning newspapers and has won four Pulitzer Prizes. Vince is a take-charge, level-headed project manager that can be counted on for solving client related issues and/or general inquiries.
Jeremy VanValkenburg
Director of Web Development
Mr. Jeremy VanValkenburg has been heavily involved in web development for several years, extending his experience to multiple platforms and methodologies. He began his career and education with client-side development and quickly realized the potential and shift in market practices toward internet-based technologies. He has worked extensively with open source and closed source systems, including Drupal and WordPress in PHP/MySQL, and DotNetNuke in .NET, as well as custom solutions in a variety of frameworks.
Mr. VanValkenburg is an exhaustive student of computer technologies. He has expended enormous efforts studying relevant market technologies and techniques, as well as less immediately applicable subject matter such as artificial intelligence, natural language processing, machine learning, and signals analysis. Wanting to better understand the complete life-cycle of the electronic device and build a robot army, he has also spent a great deal of time studying circuit design, robotics, automated sensory input, and evolutionary systems. Always keeping an eye toward the future, he is forever looking for ways to innovate and improve upon existing solutions, or simply find a better way to achieve common goals.
Sharon Ginn
Managing Editor
Sharon Ginn has been a journalist for two decades, covering topics as diverse as sports, business, health, education, media, television and breaking news.
As a staff writer for the Pulitzer Prize-winning St. Petersburg Times, Sharon covered the first four seasons of the University of South Florida’s football program, an adventure that occasionally involved trips to stadiums with no lights, no decent food and no bathroom plumbing. She’s covered the Final Four, the Super Bowl, the Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, countless college football and basketball games, Major League Baseball (when the editors made her) and a few Olympic Trials. She joined TV/radio columnists nationwide in mocking the short-lived XFL.
Recently, Sharon’s beat at the Times has involved covering small businesses during the Great Recession (which, it turns out, is a bit less fun than covering sports, even after factoring in the bad food).
Sharon also spent two years writing feature and news articles for the Boston Globe’s award-winning sports section and has freelanced for Her Sports and Fitness magazine. After graduating from the University of Florida’s College of Journalism, she spent three years at the Press-Enterprise in Riverside, Calif.
Sharon twice has been a finalist in the Associated Press Sports Editors (APSE) awards, for enterprise reporting (fifth place) and investigative reporting.
Tallia Van Eerde
Writer/Editor
Tallia holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in International Relations and Art History from Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Ga. She has worked for CNN/Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta, The Central Bank Museum in San Jose, Costa Rica, and comes to SleekFly after a year in Seoul, South Korea.
Brian Long
Writer/Editor