About Us

Steve Upton joined ntl in 1994 as head of projects for ntl's telecoms division. In 1997 he was promoted to director of network engineering and in 1999 to director of planning and implementation for the ntl Technology Division. On the creation of ntl's Networks Division in August 2001, Dr Upton took on the role of Director of Capacity Management, responsible for all data, optical and radio systems.

In June 2002, Dr Upton took over the running of the entire Networks Division. As MD, he was responsible for managing and exploiting ntl's £9bn state-of-the-art network supporting the rapid growth of telephony, broadband and Digital Television services. In addition, Steve also managed the Wholesale Services business unit, building this to a substantial proportion of the company's business revenues.

Prior to ntl, Dr Upton worked for BSkyB and Mercury Communications.

Dr Upton was educated at Southampton University and has a BSc (Hons) in Chemistry and a PhD.

Jean-Marc Racine started his career in the United Kingdom at ICL from 1993 to 1995. In 1995, he relocated to Paris and joined the French research laboratory for PHILIPS where he was involved in designing the first generation of real-time MPEG2 encoders.

He then joined CANAL+ in 1997 as sales manager for the Technology division and in this capacity supported the sales process to more than 20 digital platforms around the world. In 1999 Jean-Marc relocated from Paris to San Francisco to oversee the development of CANAL+ Technologies US subsidiary, which he founded and managed as CEO until late 2001.

Jean-Marc then relocated to Paris as Executive Vice-President Marketing for CANAL+ Technologies and remained a key member of the executive team until the acquisition of the company in January 2004. Following that, he then worked in the TV production industry, and prior to joining Farncombe, was working as an independent consultant for mobiflux, a company he founded in 2005.

Jean-Marc is a graduate of the Institute of Superior Electrical Engineering (ISEP) in Paris with a major in Electrical Engineering and Networking.

Adriana has over 12 years’ experience in the telecommunications sector. She has worked for satellite, wireless and wireline operators, broadcasters, equipment suppliers, broadband providers, banks, multilateral lending organisations, and private equity groups in Latin America, the USA, Europe, Africa and the Middle East. Her experience lies in strategy development, due diligence work, market assessment, operational reviews and business plan formulation for telecom and media companies.

Prior to joining Farncombe, Adriana was a Consulting Director at Ovum, where she concentrated on commercial strategy assignments, especially M&A transaction support projects. Prior to that she was a Director for Arnaud & Co, a mergers and acquisitions boutique specialised in telecommunications transactions; was Program Manager - Telecoms Latin America in the Yankee Group; was a member of Telefonica’s strategic planning group; and worked for McKinsey & Co. Adriana is fluent in Portuguese, Spanish and English.

She is based in our London office.

Prior to joining Farncombe, Lara worked at Visiware, a TV Interactive Games company based in France, where she was responsible for world-wide distribution of a range of interactive TV services. 

During her 10 years with the company, Lara established the Visiware brand as the most broadly-deployed game-provider on TV platforms worldwide, setting up and commercially project-managing the launch of interactive TV services on 40-plus cable and satellite networks around the globe.

Lara is from a fine art background and has a BFA in Illustration from Rochester Institute of Technology. She is from Ohio in the United States, but has lived in Paris for the past 13 years.

She is a fluent French and Italian speaker and is based in our Paris office.

Ferline has five years’ experience of project-managing Interactive Television User Interface design, and currently heads up user interface project management at our user interaction design practice, WeAreAka.

She believes that expressing clients’ marketing objectives through a given technical framework is a key to realizing their ambitions; and defines her own personal challenge as finding ways to leverage knowledge of user habits and learning schemes in order to market features, content and services to them through interaction.

Ferline has a bachelor's degree in information and communication sciences, and an MA in political sciences from Sciences Po (IEP Paris). Since then, she has specialized in interaction design, viewing the discipline as the intersection between usability, technical and strategic marketing objectives.

She is based in our Paris office.