BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit Advisory Board
We'd like to extend a special thanks to our Advisory Board members for their role in developing the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit program. As social media innovators and insiders, they have been instrumental in identifying the critical issues that need to be addressed to drive further market growth.
We invite you to learn more about them by visiting their Web sites and blogs.
Dick Costolo
Co-founder and CEO, FeedBurner
Blog: 802.11me
Dick is cofounder and CEO of FeedBurner. the market-leading feed management and monetization provider. Previously, he cofounded and was CEO of Spyonit.com. Spyonit was sold to 724 Solutions in September 2000.
Prior to Spyonit, Dick cofounded Burning Door Networked Media, a web design and development consulting company. Burning Door was acquired by Digital Knowledge Assets in October 1996. Prior to Burning Door, Dick was at Andersen Consulting for 8 years, where his roles included Senior Manager, Strategy, Application Products Group and Senior Manager, Application Infrastructure, Eagle Advanced Technology Group. Google searches may also reveal Dick's theater experience which includes, among others, numerous roles and performances with Chicago's Annoyance Theater, television appearances in the UK, and several years of improv shows at international comedy festivals in Edinburgh, Montreal, and Australia.
Dick holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Michigan.
Scott Gatz
Senior Director, Personalization Products, Yahoo, Inc.
Scott Gatz is Yahoo!’s senior director of Personalization Products, driving strategy and product management for key personalization features across the Yahoo! network. Gatz is also responsible for the Company’s content syndication/RSS initiatives and leads the team that redesigned My Yahoo! around RSS and integrated RSS into Yahoo! Mobile and Yahoo! News.
Gatz joined Yahoo! in 1998, and has led a number of popular products including My Yahoo! and Yahoo! Toolbar, integrated the GeoCities technology and its users into the Yahoo! platform, and led the team that negotiated and launched Yahoo!’s original relationship with Overture.
Robin Hopper
Founder and CEO, iUpload
blog: iUpload Insights
Robin Hopper is the founder, president and CEO of iUpload. Robin’s professional background combines extensive startup experience with years of software development and professional services delivery and management.
It is difficult to find an executive with more domain expertise in the content management market. In fact, Robin’s experience goes back to 1992, having served as VP Strategy for Ibex Technologies Inc. - the market leader fax-on-demand software (a.k.a., the “web content management pre-web market”) – from 1992 to 1998. During his tenure he helped define the document delivery and content management strategy for organizations like MCI, Bell Canada, Microsoft, Air Canada, IBM, Dell, and Canada Post.
Having helped take Ibex from start up to successful acquisition by Castelle Corporation in 1997, Robin set out to leverage his document management experience and fulfill his vision for web content management by founding iUpload. After six years in operation, iUpload is the dominant company in the rapidly growing area of hosted content management and corporate blogging. The company's solutions are relied on to manage all aspects of web content by more than 500 sites worldwide.
David Hornik
General Partner, August Capital
Blogs: VentureBlog, SaysMe
David is a General Partner with August Capital. He invests broadly in information technology companies, with a focus on consumer facing software and services, enterprise applications and infrastructure software. Prior to joining August Capital, David was an intellectual property and corporate attorney at Venture Law Group, Cravath Swaine & Moore, and Perkins Coie LLP. David teaches business and law at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and writes about the venture capital industry in VentureBlog (www.ventureblog.com). David sits on the board of Six Apart and is an investor in Technorati.
Chris Nolan
Editor and Founder, Spot-On.com
Blog: Politics from Left to Right
Politics From Left To Right founder Chris Nolan’s work is well known to tech-savvy and politically astute readers. Nolan’s weekly syndicated column, "Talk is Cheap" appeared in The New York Post, Upside and Wired.com beginning in 1999. Debuting in 1997 at the beginnings of the Internet stock boom, the column covered a wide variety of topics and was well regarded for its humor, insight and news value.
She has consistently led her peers in breaking important stories. Her reporting on Silicon Valley banker Frank Quattrone led to Quattrone’s conviction on obstruction of justice charges. Nolan’s work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic, Fortune, Business 2.0 and Conde Nast Traveler. She has spoken frequently on the impact of stand alone journalism – a phrase she has coined to describe the work that experienced and professional journalist are doing on the web -- on politics and journalism.
In addition to Politics From Left to Right, Nolan writes a political column for eWeek.com, the popular tech site, and is a contributing editor for the Personal Democracy Forum, a site examining technology's effect on politics.
Before moving to San Francisco, Nolan, who has more than 20 years of reporting experience, lived in Washington, D.C., and covered Congress and the FCC for a series of television industry trade magazines.
She hold a B.A. degree from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Burson-Marsteller
Lisa Poulson, managing director in Burson-Marsteller’s Global Technology Practice, brings a deep understanding of the processes of persuasion to her work – helping her clients understand and use communications vehicles to build essential credibility and strong relationships among the constituencies they need to reach, as well as guiding them to make provocative contributions to the public discourse. During her tenure at Sun Microsystems, Lisa launched the Java technology to business, trade and consumer press and analysts -- taking it from a lab project to an international force in software. Lisa also has significant expertise in counseling technology companies involved in intellectual property and anti-trust litigation, and has managed communications and corporate marketing at two start-ups. At Burson-Marsteller, she has served clients as diverse as IBM, the US Postal Service and Hydro-Quebec, and currently counsels clients in the firm’s Technology Practice, notably HP. Lisa serves on Guidewire Group's Sounding Board and occasionally posts thoughts on communications on Guidewire Group's Social Media blog.
Scott Rafer
Chairman, Wireless Ink
Blog: rafer.wirelessink.com
Scott Rafer is chairman of Wireless Ink, the mobile publishing service and portal. He was most recently CEO of Feedster, a rapidly growing blog search engine and advertising network. Before Feedster, Rafer co-founded WiFinder, the World's Largest Hotspot Directory; Fresher Information, a provider of immediate content indexing technology; and FotoNation, a creator of connected photography solutions. Prior to his adventures in Silicon Valley, Rafer led the Internet products group at Kodak Hollywood, and worked in investment banking at Needham & Company.He graduated from the Jerome Fisher Program in Management & Technology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Steve Rubel
Vice President, Client Services - CooperKatz & Company
Blog: Micro Persuasion
Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 15 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as Vice President, Client Services at CooperKatz & Company, a mid-size PR firm in midtown New York City.
Rubel heads up the agency's new Micro Persuasion practice, which helps clients launch conversational marketing programs that include blogs, podcasting and RSS. He also widely evangelizes the use of these new technologies via his well-read Micro Persuasion weblog (www.micropersuasion.com).
Widely viewed as an expert on blogging, podcasting and open-source marketing, Rubel is often sought out as a speaker and appears frequently in the press. In 2005 he was named to Media Magazine's 2005 Media 100 list of "people you need to know in media" and the AlwaysOn/Technorati Open Media 100.
Pito Salas
Founder and Maintainer, BlogBridge
Blog: Pito's Blog
Pito is the founder of BlogBridge (www.blogbridge.com) – a cool open source project focused on delivering a great news reader and news discovery system for info-junkies. Prior to BlogBridge, he was consulting on product strategy to various high tech and VC firms.
Before that he was the co-founder and CTO of eRoom Technology for six years – where he helped lead the company from startup to profitability and ultimately to a successful merger with Documentum.
Pito also spent a fair amount of time at Lotus Development and some other Boston area firms. When Pito is not tinkering with new technologies and software, you can find him blogging on his personal blog at www.salas.com.
Deborah Schultz
Marketing Director, Six Apart
Deborah is responsible for engaging and educating Six Apart customers, partners and developers on the powerful role of weblogging as a communication medium.
Prior to joining Six Apart, Deborah founded and launched her own successful marketing consulting firm, DRS Solutions. She was previously a consultant at the Internet consulting firm, AnswerThink and spent five years at Citibank where she led the global bank's initial foray onto the Internet. She was also a founding member of Citibank's Corporate Web Council. Deborah has lectured on entrepreneurship and the symbiotic role of marketing and technology in growing revenue and increasing customer satisfaction.
A graduate of Barnard College, Columbia University, Deborah recently left her hometown of New York City to join Six Apart because she passionately believes in the power of the Internet and weblogging to fundamentally change how individuals and businesses communicate and connect.
