Our Team

John is a key team player applying his technical expertise to every phase of the company's business - insuring client needs are met, maintained and exceeded on a daily basis. With an eye toward emerging technologies and their effects on interactive development, interactive media and state-of-the-art presentation media, John keeps his clients and employees on the cutting edge in a very competitive marketplace. John also applies his intuitive coding skills to writing original applications designed to streamline operations. Creating and maintaining state-of-the-art technology includes updating application security. John has conducted extensive research in the Internet security field including serving as a forensic consultant for the Long Beach Computer Crime Investigation Division. John began programming his own games at age 8 then started his first company at 16 as a Computer Consultant. John is an expert at working with many programming languages but his favorites are Perl on Unix and C# on Windows.

Mike is a long time believer in art and technology. “The bravest things we can do as people is to give yourself to an idea and follow it down the path to success”. As a technical master of many operating system and cutting edge technologies, he helps us to stay on the forefront of what is hip and new in the world. He has experimented and become well verse in so many areas of technology. From post production After Effects work and superb custom audio creation, to setting up 100% uptime hosting environments and custom server configurations.

Mike got his degree in Computer Information Systems in 2005, but has been involved in computers since he was a young lad, writing his first draw to and plotting programs on his dad’s Atari 800 in the early 1980’s. He has always had a passion for computers and how they work. Taking them apart and putting them back together was a big hobby of his as a child (funny how many things in life change but at the same time stay the same!). Moving on in his teens to learning programs like Photoshop and Illustrator to create flyers for his band and altering photos. There has always been a very strong passion for music in Mike's life as well. He has been in a jazz-fusion band where he plays guitar and flute for the past 13 years and recently joined a rock band where he does some unique vocal styling.

With the Calisto team by his side there is nothing that they cannot achieve together!

Gladys Diaz creates the interface design for projects, contributing expertise in comp development, front-end design and animation. Her fine art skills, eye for detail, and knowledge of user interface issues and browser and platform constraints enable her to create efficient, functional and high-end designs with looks that are appropriate to the brand and target market. She is an expert in developing HTML & CSS frameworks for large CMS-driven sites, and XHTML/CSS for mobile. She develops style guides and enjoys taking her creative design comps into hand-coded table-less XHTML & CSS, ensuring design consistency throughout projects.

Before Calisto Labs, Gladys worked as an Interactive Designer and quickly proved her design abilities as she took on the role of Art Director at ad2, a Los Angeles ad agency. For the five years she's worked there, she lead the design for numerous projects for high-profile clients such as SANYO, IGN, Robb Report, Wells Fargo, GRAMMY, Bose+Ferrari and more. She's designed over 35 small to large-scale Web sites and apps, garnering over 25 Web and graphic design awards.

Gladys believes in and strives for a professional and versatile Web design style. Interestingly, she mostly finds inspiration in non-Web-related areas such as fashion, architecture, and art direction in films and video games. When inspiration hits, she draws with color pencil and does photography. A believer in a balanced lifestyle, she enjoys family BBQs and loves traveling. Gladys graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Oregon where she earned a B.S. in Multimedia Design and double-minors in Business Administration and Computer Information Technology.

As an adolescent, Greg considered making games with Hypercard and “photoshopping” friends faces into strange photos to be a hobby – that was before he discovered it was an actual career. Greg accredits his unique interests in both visual design and computer technology to growing up in Palo Alto, California during the first dot com boom. It was an incredible time to be a teenager and be able to watch the gold-rush of the internet take place in my own backyard.”

In later years, Greg went on to received his Bachelors of Arts degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in Design| Media Arts – a unique program that combined the rigor and formality of graphic design with the mixed-media free-for-all of digital technology. After college, Greg worked as a freelance designer/developer dabbling in brand-identity design, print and interactive. It was the constant challenge, and growth of the Web that kept Greg’s interest, where his focus quickly became interactive design/development for ad2, inc located in El Segundo California. At ad2, Greg worked his way up from entry-level designer to eventually, Creative Director, working to aid in the management of design production and overall project direction.

Now, as a Partner at Calisto Labs, LLC, Greg focuses on the intersection of creative process and technology, working to combine programming and design, in order to extend brand objectives into the interactive realm. In the studio, Greg's role varies from Creative Director, to Actionscript Programmer, to User Interface Designer. Greg believes the future of the internet lies in the hands of creative individuals that understand technology – and technical people that can understand creatives.

Jesal is a developer/programmer who started his adventures on the web over a decade ago in the early days of the internet when people utilized terminal-style internet access, sometimes referred to as a shell account and logged into BBSes, MuDs, etc. using a text-only web browser (Lynx) with their dial-up modems (Remember those days?). Subsequently he followed his passion for technology and graduated with a degree in Computer Science. Throughout years of experience in the web industry since then, he has been involved in a number of projects of all sizes/complexity and has worn a variety of hats.

Now more recently, as a partner and co-founder of Calisto Labs, LLC, he takes on the role of a code ninja (aka VP of Engineering) with extensive professional experience in various aspects of server side and client side programming using LAMP and WISA stacks. He strives to be a continual supplier of new technical solutions and ideas by keeping up with the pace of technology and innovation on the web, staying on top with the latest news and trends in the industry, and experimenting with various cutting-edge APIs and platforms. His ability to see the big picture as well as obsess over the minute details makes him capable of successfully taking on a diverse set of challenges and delivering the best product for his clients. Having a diversified background has had its advantages and has significantly contributed to the building blocks of who he is today.