Andy Baio | |
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 Andy Baio in 2012 | |
| Born | 1977 (age 46–47) |
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| Website | waxy |
Andy Baio (born 1977 [1] ) is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the XOXO festival, founder of the Upcoming social calendar website, a former CTO of Kickstarter, and the author of the Waxy.org blog.
In 2003, while working as a webmaster at a Texas-based financial company, Baio launched the Upcoming collaborative event calendar. [2] [3] The site was acquired by Yahoo for $2 million 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] After Yahoo closed Upcoming and offered to sell the domain back to Baio, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that surpassed its $30,000 goal in May 2014 to revive the site. [9] [3]
In June 2017, Baio joined the Fuzzco creative studio as Technology Director. [10]
In October 2018, Baio and his fellow XOXO festival cofounder Andy McMillan announced they would be taking over Drip, a creator funding platform that Kickstarter had acquired in 2016. Kickstarter continued to run the platform while Baio and McMillan took it over, and Kickstarter provided the duo with seed funding. Baio and McMillan started a public-benefit corporation, separate from Kickstarter, to run the project. [11] However, in mid-2019, they shut it down before launching and returned the remaining funding to Kickstarter, saying that they could not find a way to sustainably run the business without exposing the creators who would rely on it to too much risk. [12]
In 2021, Baio launched the Skittish virtual event platform, where participants could move around as virtual animal avatars and interact with other inhabitants via spatial voice chat. [13] Wired described the project as "equal parts audio chat, serendipity, and Animal Crossing ." [14] The platform was funded with a grant from Grant for the Web, [15] a program in turn funded by Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a micropayments startup. [16] Skittish shut down in December 2022. [17]
Baio was involved in the early dissemination of the Star Wars Kid viral video, which depicted teenager Ghyslain Raza clumsily emulating martial arts moves for the camera. [18] In response to the negative attention the boy received, Baio and another blogger, Jish Mukerji, organized a fundraiser for Raza which gathered almost $1,000 from about 100 donors. [18] [19] In March 2022, Baio met Raza and apologized to him for amplifying the video. Baio later said in the documentary Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows that he had "enormous regret about posting the video." Raza accepted his apology, saying that Baio "provides a beautiful lesson of humanity that a good person can make a mistake and that mistake can have very important consequences but that, at the end of the day, Andy could be like any one of us." [20]
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. [21] 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. [22]
In 2009, Baio 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. [23]
Baio has written for Wired magazine [24] and The New York Times , [25] and was a staffer on R. U. Sirius' online magazine GettingIt.com. [26] Baio coined the term supercut in 2008, which in 2017 became known through the song "Supercut" by singer Lorde. [27]
Baio has blogged at Waxy.org since 2002, and is considered to be one of the first linkbloggers. [28]
In early 2012, Baio and Andy McMillan co-founded the XOXO festival, which describes itself as "an experimental festival celebrating independent artists and creators working on the internet". The conference was held annually in Portland, Oregon, from 2012 to 2019 and in 2024. The conferences were largely funded via prepaid tickets and other contributions, including via Kickstarter. [29] [30] Baio describes the conference as a "consensual hallucination", using William Gibson's 1984 description for cyberspace. [28]
In 2015, Baio and McMillan worked to open Outpost, a shared, pay-what-you-can workspace in Portland for members of the XOXO community. [31] [32] Outspace was open from February to December 2016, but ultimately shuttered due to high rental costs. [33]
Baio was born in 1977. His mother is journalism professor Toni Allen, who was the head of the journalism department at Oxnard College. [34] [35]
Baio lives in Portland, Oregon. [32] He has a son, who was born in 2004. [36] Baio is colorblind. [37]
A screener (SCR) is an advance or promotional copy 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.
Upcoming is a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio.
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 has since affirmed his identity and has used the video to help to speak on the effects of bullying and harassment.
Musopen is an organization which creates, produces and disseminates Western classical music, via public domain recordings, sheet music and educational resources. It stands with the ChoralWiki and the Wind Repertory Project as among the most prominent online music databases.
Anamanaguchi is an American chiptune-based pop and rock band from New York City. The band has four members: lead songwriters and guitarists Peter Berkman and Ary Warnaar, bassist James DeVito, and drummer Luke Silas.
Kickstarter, PBC 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 US$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.
Homestuck is an Internet fiction series created by American author and artist Andrew Hussie. 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.
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 was an annual festival and conference held in Portland, Oregon, that described 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".
Offbeatr was a US website for crowdfunding pornography. It has been described as “Kickstarter for porn”. Project creators posted pitches for new projects, which could be media, events or objects. The user community voted on projects. If a project got enough votes, it would open for funding. If a project met its goal, then the project creator got the funds. Project creators could also sell previously created material. Projects had to be based in either United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, France, Australia, or New Zealand.
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.
Brendan Becker, known by his stage name Inverse Phase, is an American video game composer and chiptune musician, using Atari, Commodore, and Nintendo hardware. He also speaks and hosts workshops on video game music, chiptunes, and composing.
Andrew Hussie is an American author and artist. He is best known as the creator of Homestuck, a multimedia webcomic presented in the style of a text-based graphical adventure game, as well as other works in a similar style that were hosted on his website MS Paint Adventures.
Hiveswap is an episodic adventure game developed by What Pumpkin Games and overseen by Andrew Hussie and Cohen Edenfield. Based in the universe of Hussie's MS Paint Adventures webcomic Homestuck, it focuses on a girl, Joey Claire, who is accidentally transported to the planet of Alternia—home of the troll species seen in Homestuck.
Patreon is a monetization platform operated by Patreon, Inc., that provides business tools for content creators to run a subscription service and sell digital products. It helps artists and other creators earn a recurring income by providing rewards and perks to its subscribers. Patreon charges a commission of 9 to 12 percent of creators' monthly income, in addition to payment processing fees.
The Coolest Cooler was a multi-function cooler that was initially funded through the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. In the summer of 2014, Ryan Grepper raised over $13 million, making it the most funded Kickstarter campaign of 2014. In December 2019, the company announced that it was closing, with over 20,000 of the 62,642 original backers never receiving a cooler. The project came to be regarded as Kickstarter's largest failure.
Andy McMillan is a designer, event organiser, and non-alcoholic beverage entrepreneur. He ran the Build web design conference in Northern Ireland, and co-founded the XOXO indie artist and creator festival with Andy Baio in Portland, Oregon. McMillan also founded the Portland-based Suckerpunch non-alcoholic cocktail bar and Heck non-alcoholic brewery.
Harebrained Schemes, LLC is an American video game developer based in Seattle, Washington. It was co-founded in 2011 by Jordan Weisman and Mitch Gitelman. Prior to founding Harebrained Schemes, Weisman and Gitelman worked together on the MechCommander and Crimson Skies franchises at FASA, another company founded by Weisman. As of mid-2015, the studio had under 60 employees. The studio was acquired by Paradox Interactive in June 2018. Harebrained Schemes and Paradox Interactive parted ways on January 1, 2024.
Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish artist, musician, and designer specialising in retro-futuristic digital images focused on nostalgic Swedish countryside alternate history environments. The settings of his artwork have formed the basis for the 2020 Amazon television drama series Tales from the Loop as well as the upcoming film The Electric State.
