Finis Conner Board’s Advisor, 5BARz

5BARz International Inc. announced that Finis Conner, one of the original founders of Seagate Technology, Inc., has joined its Advisory Board, effective immediately.

For his entire career Finis Conner has identified and executed winning trends in the technology industry.

Conner’s experience in selling, designing and manufacturing hard disk drives played a major role in creating the multi-trillion dollar, global technology market that we know today. He has been pivotal in migrating computing from floor towers, desktops, laptops and now to your back pocket with smaller devices, higher capacity and lower costs.

Conner’s career was launched when he co-founded Shugart Associates in 1973, where they produced and sold 8" floppy and HDDs. The company was sold to Xerox Corporation in 1977.

In 1979, Conner recognized the trend to smaller computers and conceived the original 5.25", 5MB Winchester disc drive which led to co-founding Seagate Technology. Many computer manufactures at the time didn’t see the need for that much memory but Conner sought out and later sold Steve Job at Apple Computer, 95% of his first years production. Today Seagate is the largest drive company in the world with a $12 billion market capitalization, 50,000 employees and shipping over 50,000,000 drives per quarter.

In 1986, Conner saw the eventual migration of computers to even smaller and smaller form factors and developed the 3.5" hard drive. There was little interest at Seagate to develop this drive at the time, so Conner set out to start yet another company.

He found an eager partner in Compaq Computer who invested $35,000,000 in the new Conner Peripherals and became the launch customer for the 3.5" Winchester Drive.

Conner Peripherals was an instant success and became the fastest-growing company in U.S. history with Conner leading the growth of the company to $1.4 billion in sales in only its 4th year and $2.7 billion in its 10th year, when he engineered the sale of the company to his former company and then rival, Seagate.

Conner had developed top management teams throughout his career in multiple disciplines including, sales, marketing, manufacturing and distribution. Under Conner, both Seagate and Conner Peripherals built World Class ISO 9001 high tech manufacturing facilities around the globe, including, California, Singapore, China, Vietnam, Ireland, Scotland and Italy.

Over his career, his companies were responsible for creating in excess of 160,000 technology jobs.

Visionary student of market trends, and a leader in developing market beating companies with unmatched financial performance, he has been a leader in the storage market and key player in the development of the worldwide computer market.

"I have been working for years to provide solutions to the very rapidly growing Mobile markets for communication, content, financial, ID and security," he said. "5BARz has a global focus in bringing a unique and important solution to the mobile communication markets around the world and this will provide long term value to these markets. I am very pleased to have an opportunity to participate with the members of management and a distinguished Advisory Board."

Conner is currently the chairman and CEO of BluStor, LTD.

Daniel Bland, president and CEO of 5BARz International, states: "Since getting involved with the 5BARz technology, we have maintained close contact with Finis, as the Company contemplates the logistics of a global rollout of our cellular network infrastructure products. As one of the noted executives that help build the global personal computer industry we are extremely excited to welcome Finis to our advisory board.  His experience and insights are invaluable to 5BARz as we negotiate this opportunity through a global roll-out. Conner joins fellow Advisory Board member Marcello Caputo (CEO of Telefonica USA) and George Lauro, as we integrate the 5BARz technology into the wireless marketplace in the Americas and beyond."

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