Who We Are
We, Michael-Paul Terranova and Arbi Stepanian, are the co-founders of Risen Media. Two years ago, when much of the world halted, we sped forward with an idea after seeing a need in the presentation market for software that was more efficient and reliable. We have combined our divergent talents and shared entrepreneurial spirit to develop a visual presentation software we believe can be game-changing for churches, schools and businesses.
Arbi Stepanian
Co Founder, Software Engineer
Michael-Paul Terranova
Co Founder, Creative Director
Arbi Stepanian
Arbi began coding at the age of 14 with GW-Basic on MS-DOS and by 1999 had earned a MCP certificate. He started his first company that year, building a windows based application with Visual Basic 6.0 and MS Access for doctors’ offices. He later started a second company building windows based applications for the trucking industry with Visual Basic .NET, Oracle and SQL Server. In 2009 he launched into new adventures, immigrating to the United States and taking on projects as a C# ASP.NET full-stack developer for a digital marketing agency. He has since continued to rise through the ranks at the most preeminent software companies, and holds a MCSA (Web Development) Certificates. Arbi has drawn on this deep well of experience to develop superb software for Risen Media.
Michael-Paul Terranova
Michael-Paul is an award-winning graphic designer, whose credits include creating advertising campaigns for blockbuster films, top-selling video games, and interactive web development for high-end entertainment brands. Michael-Paul has brought his decades of experience with creating eye-catching design and his understanding of marketing messaging to design a user-interface for Risen Media that is attractive and intuitive. Drawing on his own experience as a church volunteer, Michael-Paul has made it his highest priority to design Risen Media in a way that makes it easy for new users to learn quickly.
How Risen Media Began
The idea for Risen Media started when we saw that our church was using three different pieces of software and two different subscriptions to create a single presentation each Sunday. That model was expensive and inefficient, difficult for the mostly volunteer staff to learn, and prone to crashes, and errors that interrupted the flow of the worship service. As we investigated further, we learned most churches have similar set-ups for presentation, with the added difficulty that the existing presentation programs are locked to a single computer due to their download model. Numerous team members involved in presenting weekly services, classes and other gatherings each have to come to that machine to prepare presentations, and can typically only display them in the main sanctuary due to hardware requirements.
We decided to create a single software package that met all the various presentation needs for our church in one place. We also envisioned software that could also be accessed from any device, at any time, from any place.
Risen Media is a cloud-based presentation software with an initial target audience of churches and other houses of worship, but with the long-term vision of expanding into other markets such as educational and business environments. With Risen Media, the design process and display functions are all in one place. Users can put together the visuals to accent a sermon, lecture, or worship service using our catalog of hundreds of design templates, pre-loaded song lyrics, and library of Bible translations, including 5 different languages. Since Risen Media is a cloud-based system, the process of creating a presentation can easily be a collaborative effort, with different team members completing different parts, each from their own home or office. Our software also includes work-flow management features, allowing teams to track progress, and create approval rules.
Risen Media also includes a unique feature called SideSlide™. Existing presentation programs can only display one image at a time, no matter how many display screens are in a room. SideSlide™ permits the presenter to show differing images on multiple screens, all at once, greatly increasing the opportunity to create visually exciting presentations that will engage the audience.
We have completed over a year and a half of successful beta testing with Risen Media, and are now developing our business plan to bring Risen Media into the wider market.