Entrepreneur
Michael Yuen is an award-winning entertainment and technology entrepreneur, Michael launched his tech venture creating 3D online games for movies and TV shows including The Titanic, The Fifth Element and Xena - Warrior Princess. He was named a Rising Star by Animation Magazine and won The Grand Prize for SGI's Best 3D Online Content In the World Contest.
Currently Michael is building Showbucks, a mobile app platform that combines social video with social games to bring face-to-face human interaction back to social apps. Advisors include the partners of Founders Den and MC Hammer. Turner Broadcasting is an investor.
Michael was founder/CEO of speech application platform Apptera. He designed the first web-based platform for developing and managing enterprise-class speech applications, named SpeechTek Product of the Year. Michael brought in Bank of America as the first customer. Apptera now handles over 100 million calls per year. Customers include BofA, Fandango, Moviefone and MovieTickets.com The company is funded by VC firms Lightspeed and Alloy ventures.
Michael's interests include screenplay writing and filmmaking. His romantic comedy "Spaghetti vs. Noodle" won The Best Pitch for a Feature Film at the Sundance Producers Conference. CAA represented the project and generated multiple offers to produce the film. Both Quentin Tarantino and Brett Ratner offered to be producers. Michael is a member of the Producers Guild of America.
Michael studied aerospace engineering at UCLA and earned a degree in mechanical engineering. He holds a patent in voice application system.