Andy Baio | |
|---|---|
 Andy Baio in 2012 | |
| Occupation(s) | blogger and technologist [1] |
| Employer | self |
Andy Baio is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the XOXO Festival, founder of Upcoming.org, a former CTO of Kickstarter and the author of the Waxy.org blog.
In 2003, Baio launched Upcoming, a collaborative event calendar. [2] The site was acquired by Yahoo for an undisclosed sum in 2005 and Baio joined the company as the site's Technical Director. [3] In 2007, Baio announced his departure from Yahoo. [4] [5]
In September 2008, Baio joined the board of directors of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that helps people with project ideas to connect with potential funders. [6] Baio later joined the staff as Chief Technical Officer in July 2009, [7] stepping down in November 2010 to join Expert Labs. [8] In June 2017, Baio joined Fuzzco as Technology Director. [9]
After Yahoo offered to sell the Upcoming domain back to Baio, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that hit its $30,000 goal in May 2014 to revive the site. [10]
Baio was involved in the dissemination of the Star Wars Kid video, which depicted teenager Ghyslain Raza clumsily emulating martial arts moves for the camera. [11] In response to the negative attention the boy received, Baio and another blogger, Jish Mukerji, organized a fundraiser which gathered up $1,000 from about 100 donors. [11] [12] In March 2022, Baio met Raza and apologised to him for posting the video. Raza accepted his apology. [13]
When the parody cartoon House of Cosbys was taken down from its original site due to a cease and desist letter from Bill Cosby's attorney, Baio placed the videos on his own website. [14] Baio later received a similar cease and desist letter but refused to comply, citing fair use and decrying what he termed "a special kind of discrimination against amateur creators on the Internet", since Cosby had often been parodied in the mainstream media. [15] In 2009, he produced Kind of Bloop, a chiptune tribute album commemorating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis' Kind of Blue . The album's cover was a pixel art version of the original album's cover, which consisted of a photograph taken by Jay Maisel. Attorneys representing Maisel demanded damages and that the resulting image be removed from the chiptune album, resulting in a settlement of $32,500 from Baio. [16]
Baio has also written for Wired magazine [17] and The New York Times , [18] and was a staffer on R. U. Sirius' online magazine GettingIt.com. [19] Baio coined the term supercut in 2008, which in 2017 became known through the song "Supercut" by singer Lorde. [20]
In early 2012, Baio and Andy McMillan co-founded the XOXO Festival, celebrating independent artists and technologists. The conference has been held in Portland, Oregon, since 2012. The conferences have been largely funded via prepaid tickets and other contributions, including via Kickstarter. [21] [22]
William Henry Cosby Jr. is an American comedian, actor, and media personality. He has made significant contributions to American and African-American culture, and gained a reputation as "America's Dad" for his portrayal of Cliff Huxtable on The Cosby Show (1984–1992). He has received numerous awards and honorary degrees throughout his career, many of which were revoked following sexual assault allegations made against him in 2014.
A screener (SCR) is an advance screening of a film or television series sent to critics, awards voters, video stores, and other film industry professionals, including producers and distributors. It is similar to giving out a free advance copy of books before it is printed for mass distribution. Director John Boorman is credited with creating the first Oscar screeners to promote his film The Emerald Forest in 1985.
Lava Records is an American record label owned by Jason Flom in partnership with Universal Music Group.
Upcoming is a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio.
House of Cosbys is an American animated sitcom created by Justin Roiland for the film festival Channel 101. The series centers on Mitchell Reynolds, who builds a cloning machine to make duplicates of his favorite comedian, Bill Cosby. The show stars Davis, Roiland, and a rotating cast of performers, many of whom were participants at Channel 101. The series premiered January 30, 2005, and was the number one-rated program on the site for three months. Four episodes of the series were created, which debuted at Channel 101 screenings and were posted online thereafter. The series concluded on June 26, 2005 with an "unofficial" fifth installment.
The Kleptones are a one-man English electronic music act fronted by music producer and DJ Eric Kleptone. They are best known for their Internet-exclusive mashup albums. Typically, Eric Kleptone mixes rock/R&B instrumentals with rap and hip-hop vocals in a style that is "fun... and often surprising". Both his name and the group's name are parodies of the famous guitarist Eric Clapton, and a play on the fact that he is a "klepto of tones".
Jay Maisel is an American photographer.
ROFLCon was a biennial convention of internet memes that took place in 2008, 2010 and 2012, featuring various internet celebrities. All three events were at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. ROFLCon was first organized by a group of students from Harvard University led by Tim Hwang. According to Hwang, the inspiration for the conference was the September 23, 2007 meetup of fans of xkcd with its creator, Randall Munroe, in a park in North Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Star Wars Kid is a viral video made in 2002 by Ghyslain Raza in which he wields a golf ball retriever in imitation of Darth Maul's lightsaber moves from the film Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. At the time, Raza was a 15-year-old high school student from Trois-Rivières, Quebec, Canada. He had not intended for the video to become public, but its subsequent release led to ridicule, during which Raza chose to distance himself from the video. Raza since has affirmed his identity and has used the video to help to speak on the effects of bullying and harassment.
Kickstarter is an American public benefit corporation based in Brooklyn, New York, that maintains a global crowdfunding platform focused on creativity. The company's stated mission is to "help bring creative projects to life". As of February 2023, Kickstarter has received $7 billion in pledges from 21.7 million backers to fund 233,626 projects, such as films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, board games, technology, publishing, and food-related projects.
Matt Lunsford is the founder and co-owner of Polyvinyl Record Co., an American independent record label headquartered in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.
Homestuck is an Internet fiction series created by American author and artist Andrew Hussie in the latter half of the 2000s. The fourth and best-known of Hussie's four MS Paint Adventures, it originally ran from April 13, 2009 to April 13, 2016. Though normally described as a webcomic, and partly constituted by a series of single panel pages, Homestuck also relied heavily on Flash animations and instant message logs to convey its story, along with occasional use of browser games.
Levi "Doctor Octoroc" Buffum is an American chiptune musician and pixel artist based in Philadelphia.
Occupy Comics: Art & Stories Inspired by Occupy Wall Street is a three-issue comic book anthology series published by Black Mask Studios in 2013. Funded on Kickstarter, the series articulates themes of the Occupy Wall Street movement through comics as well as fund-raises on behalf of the protesters.
XOXO is an annual festival and conference held in Portland, Oregon, that describes itself as "an experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online". XOXO was founded in 2012 by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan with funding from prepaid tickets and other contributions via Kickstarter. In 2016, technology website The Verge called it "the internet's best festival".
A supercut is a genre of video editing consisting of a montage of short clips with the same theme. The theme may be an action, a scene, a word or phrase, an object, a gesture, or a cliché or trope. The technique has its roots in film and television and is related to vidding. The montage obsessively isolates a single element from its source or sources. It is sometimes used to create a satirical or comic effect or to collapse a long and complex narrative into a brief summary.
Andy McMillan is a co-founder of XOXO festival.
FFFFOUND! was a social bookmarking web site that allowed registered users to share already existing images on the Internet and to receive personalized recommendations of other images. Users not registered could view these posts and the corresponding recommendations; registration was strictly by invitation. The site was established in 2007 by Yosuke Abe and Keita Kitamura of the Japanese company Tha, owned by Yugo Nakamura.
"Supercut" is a song by New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde from her second album, Melodrama (2017). Lorde co-wrote the track with Jack Antonoff, both of whom also co-produced it with Joel Little, with additional production from Frank Dukes, Jean-Benoît Dunckel and Malay. It is a synth-pop, electropop, electronic, and disco song that draws influence from other genres, such as dance, electro house, electronica and new wave music. The lyrics are about Lorde reviewing her most joyful memories from a previous relationship and realising the illusion is no longer present.
The Melodrama World Tour was the second concert tour by New Zealand singer-songwriter Lorde, undertaken in support of her second studio album, Melodrama (2017). Lorde headlined several music festivals before commencing the tour, and went on to communicate frequently with stage designer Es Devlin to plan the show's design. European shows began in September 2017, followed by dates in Oceania and a solo trek through North America. Dates in other European cities soon followed along with various festival performances.
