Canoe Staffs Colorado Outpost

Canoe Ventures has gone west: The advanced-advertising venture, formed by the U.S.'s six biggest cable operators, announced Tuesday the appointment of two engineering executives, Kevin McHugh and Tom Huber, both of whom will be based in Centennial, Colo.

Canoe's engineering office near Denver, which has been a center of cable-technology development, is in space leased from the Comcast Media Center, which is providing office and lab space as well as technical services. The office opened April 1.

Huber, executive director of system integration and test, and McHugh, executive director of interactive applications, both report to Christy Martin, Canoe's vice president of solutions engineering.

"I am excited to have seasoned veterans like Kevin and Tom join our growing engineering team," Martin said in a prepared statement. "With teams in New York and Colorado, we now are better positioned to work with industry colleagues across the country as we build solutions that add value to programmers' advertising inventory, and ultimately to marketers and viewers."

Martin, who is based in New York, was most recently principal at iBox System and previously chief technology officer of Canal Plus Technologies.

Huber previously was a consultant at DigiForge and oversaw worldwide deployment of products for interactive TV firm OpenTV. McHugh previously was senior director of product development at Tandberg Television.

Based in New York, Canoe was founded last summer by Comcast, Time Warner Cable, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Bright House Networks.