Two internationally renowned web experts

Montreal, October 22, 2009 – Karl Dubost and Olivier Théreaux, who spent a number of years working together in Japan for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), recently joined the web team at Pheromone (formerly VDL2). They will reinforce the web technology and culture expertise of the agency, which is already recognized as a Quebec leader in the field.
“I want to show that respecting web standards and its technological foundations is not a limitation, but rather reinforces the marketing efficacy, user experience and human dimension of the interactive space,” says Karl Dubost, who has taken on the management of Pheromone’s development team.
Olivier Théreaux is in charge of the agency’s product architecture. “Pheromone and I share a desire to create a more intelligent, collaborative and relevant web,” he says.
“The arrival of Karl and Olivier, whose talent is recognized throughout the international web community, confirms the aptness of Pheromone defining new marketing and agency models, just when the traditional model is being questioned every day,” says Yves Lapierre, vice president of finance and human resources. “They will also contribute to the new positioning of Pheromone, which no longer recognizes frontiers between interactive platforms or geographical frontiers.”
The W3C, where Karl and Olivier worked for almost ten years, was founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, to supervise the development of norms and standards that ensure the compatibility of web technologies and usages.
Karl Dubost got involved in the web’s evolution in 1991, in the university context and in private enterprise. In 2000, he was recruited in France by the W3C as a conformance manager to organize quality assurance activities from start to finish: he put in place a validation process for web standards, with a lateral view of all technologies. In 2005, he joined the W3C’s Japanese team at Keio University. He then became an evangelist for W3C standards, publishing articles and documents, blogging for the organization, participating in conferences, conducting training, etc. He was a bridge between moderating discussions internally and managing conversations in the web ecosystem. In 2007, he took part in implementing a working group that defined the HTML5 standard, a group made up of over 400 players in the industry worldwide.
Olivier Théreaux, an engineer who graduated from the École Centrale Paris, joined the W3C in Japan in 2000. He quickly became a member of the quality assurance department. From 2004 to 2009, he was in charge of the W3C’s validation tools. Developed in open source, these services are used every day by millions of developers and designers.
In 2004, Olivier Théreaux founded the international network Art Beat in Japan, and its multilingual web sites today offer a primary source of information on the art and design scene from Tokyo to New York.