About Us

miaplaza is an online platform for open and private communities of interest such as literature buffs, hobby historians, parent groups, churches or just for your family and friends. miaplaza enables communties - our so-called Plazas - to organize and communicate online via photos, blogs, events and a marketplace.

Plaza members share what is important with those who are important in their lives. Members see at a glance what is new in their different communities and decide what information they would like to share with others.

Furthermore, miaplaza acts as a service provider for several media partners, in particular many regional newspapers. These partners use miaplaza's platform to offer co-branded community portals for their readers and users. Please contact us if you are looking for an embedded online community or social networking solution for your website or newspaper.

miaplaza Inc. was founded in 2005 in Palo Alto, California by an international team under the leadership of miaplaza's CEO and cofounder, Johannes Ziegler.

Prior to miaplaza Johannes was the founder and CEO of Synesis Inc. a Stanford-spin-off management consulting firm helping high tech companies improve their organizational effectiveness. Johannes also worked as a researcher at the Stanford Computer Industry Project and as a consultant with McKinsey & Co. Together with his wife Swenja and their five young children he is involved in many different communities: "The vision for miaplaza was inspired by my personal need to interact with many different communities and individuals. On miaplaza I post pictures and make them visible for personal friends and for my family in Germany. I share news with fellow parents or the local expatriate community. And I can keep in touch with my friends from all over the world. With the limited free time I have, I am able to revive old friendships and form new ones on miaplaza.

Johannes has assembled a strong international team. Head of development and co-founder Stefan Petry brings more than 10 years of technology management experience to miaplaza. Before that he held several positions at Oracle Corp., nCircle Inc., Corio Inc. (now IBM) and McKinsey & Co.  Other key contributors include co-founder David Hansen (business development), Tobias Bielenstein (communication) and Martin Baumann (design).

Chief engineer is Tobias Polley, winner of the German National Computing Competition in 2000. He works with a team with four more award winning developers. miaplaza's advisory board includes Webb McKinney, formerly Executive VP at Hewlett-Packard and the manager in charge of HP's entry into the home computing business, and Elizabeth Tse. Elizabeth is the Vice President of Worldwide Billing at eBay Inc. and brings ample web marketing and operations experience to miaplaza.miaplaza currently offers services for members who speak English or German. As we get more native speakers of other languages on the team we'll come out with those languages too.