After Mary’s very first visit with Beth and Amy two years ago (what was supposed to be a simple, hour-long, get-to-know-you lunch became a three-hour meeting) she found herself incredulous. She’s fond of saying that after this first meeting “I just wanted to marry those two!”  OneSeventeen Media welcomed Mary’s vivacious energy and shared her skip-the-dating-phase interest in partnering.

Mary is a creative visionary proven through her very early anticipation of the learning games market in toys and software, inspired by her career launch at Sesame Street.  The first electronic toys she created with Texas Instruments would later define the industry: Speak & Spell, Touch & Tell, Computer Fun, Voyager, and Math To Go.  Her production of the first ever "learning through play" software in the early 1980's led to her founding Looking Glass Software. She and her team developed groundbreaking work for Disney, Mister Rogers, Sesame Street's software group, McGraw Hill and Bantam Books. As if Mary’s creative genius isn’t spiked with enough super power for one creative lady, she’s got business moxy too. She led product development for The Learning Company, and her product lines helped take them through a 10x valuation IPO.

Her extensive and impressive consulting experience reads like a Who’s Who in business and includes technology firms, educational publishers and toy companies such as Computer Curriculum Corporation, Kaleida (IBM-Apple), Microsoft, Disney Interactive, Spin Master Toys and LeapFrog.  Mary also speaks at conferences and is a frequent face at many a toy-manufacturing gathering as she is an avid gamer and toy inventor at heart.

While the company she founded was at the University of Texas technology incubator, Mary developed her adaptive learning technology, which was acquired by Ignite! Learning.  The Adaptive Learning differentiator and intellectual property (IP) algorithms helped to define Ignite! and allowed them to raise a whopping $20M. Smartly, Mary retained the rights to the Adaptive Learning methodology and algorithms, and it is her unique and patentable Adaptive Learning Engine™ that is the scalable “secret sauce” underpinning of OneSeventeen Media’s various properties – such as PlumbBrain, PlumbBrain Radio Show Network and the Adaptive Creative Advertising Network.

When Mary recharges her creative battery, it’s usually on her beautiful, breezy back porch overlooking the Texas Hill Country and Pedernales River. Her favorite little four-legged friends, a Bernese Mountain and French Bull Dog named Heidi and Bianca, are never far away. You might also spot her leisurely boat riding along the lazy Pedernales with her husband, Rusty.

About Mary...

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