We are excited to have Shameel Arafin joining MediaStorm as a Developer. Shameel is a web-application architect, back-end developer, database wrangler, and system administrator. He studied engineering and literature at Caltech and Harvard. Following college, he worked in investment banking during the (first) dotcom boom, at Deutsche Bank and Credit Suisse First Boston. After five years on Wall Street, he returned to his engineering roots and joined the team at Massify as a developer and project manager, where he helped launch a social network and crowd-sourcing web application for the film and TV industry. In 2008 he co-founded SignalFive, where where he developed projects that varied from the Repower America Wall (for Al Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection), to PopStay, a social tool for vacation rentals and home swapping.

If you've been thinking of spending your summer learning some new multimedia skills, we have several opportunities coming up for you. We will be holding an Advanced Multimedia Workshop from July 23-29 at our office in Brooklyn, NY. Application deadline is May 27 (one week from today). If you're interested in a hands-on workshop where you'll work with a team to conceive, plan, report and produce a multimedia story in one week, you should consider applying for this workshop. More information about the workshops is here. Applications are accepted online. If you're more interested in the organization and thinking behind creating successful multimedia departments and curricula, check out our Methodology Workshop, to be held August 8-12, 2011. This five-day workshop is also held in Brooklyn, NY, and delves deep into the methodology and business of multimedia storytelling approaches and models. The application deadline for the Methodology Workshop is June 1, 2011. You…