Robert Scoble | |
---|---|
Born | Piscataway, New Jersey, U.S. | January 18, 1965
Occupation | Author |
Known for | Blogging, Advocating Technology |
Spouse | Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble |
Children | 3 |
Robert Scoble (born January 18, 1965) is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He later worked for Fast Company as a video blogger, and then Rackspace and the Rackspace-sponsored community site Building 43 promoting breakthrough technology and startups. [1] [2] [3]
Scoble was born in New Jersey in 1965, and grew up about a kilometer from Apple Computer’s head office in Silicon Valley. [4]
In 1993, he dropped out without finishing his degree in journalism from San Jose State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications. [5] [6] [7]
In June 2003, Scoble accepted a position at Microsoft. The Economist described Scoble’s influence in its February 15, 2005 edition: [8] [9]
He has become a minor celebrity among geeks worldwide, who read his blog religiously. Impressively, he has also succeeded where small armies of more conventional public-relations types have been failing abjectly for years: he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world, and especially to the independent software developers that are his core audience
On June 10, 2006, Scoble announced [10] he was leaving Microsoft to join Podtech.net as vice president of media development with a higher salary accompanied by "a quite aggressive stock option" [11] offer that would have made him wealthy if his new company had succeeded. [12] [13] According to Alexa Internet that day had the biggest traffic to his blog and PodTech over their lifetime. [14] June 28, 2006 was his last day at Microsoft.
On December 11, 2007, while taking part in a panel discussion at the LeWeb3 Conference, he inadvertently leaked news (by loading up a post on TechCrunch) that he would be leaving PodTech on January 14, 2008, and was likely to join Fast Company. He acknowledged the news on his blog on December 12 but stated that he had not yet signed on with Fast Company. He did a video interview about his plans [15] and leased studio space from Revision3.
On March 3, 2008, Scoble launched FastCompany.tv with two shows: FastCompany Live and ScobleizerTV. He characterizes the first as "a show done totally on cell phones." The second is similar to his previous show on PodTech, only with better equipment and a camera operator. The show is recorded with two cameras in 720p HD. [16]
On March 14, 2009, Scoble announced via his blog and on the Gillmor Gang that he was joining Rackspace. As part of his work there, he teamed up with the company to develop Building 43, a new content and social networking website aimed to help grow new startups and promote groundbreaking technology. In 2012, Building 43 was re-branded as Small Teams, Big Impact. [17]
Scoble left Rackspace to join UploadVR in 2016 as an entrepreneur in residence. [18]
On October 20, 2017, the news outlet BuzzFeed published a story that alleges that in 2010, Scoble sexually assaulted Michelle Greer, his Rackspace coworker, and Quinn Norton, a technology journalist. [19] Scoble apologized after the BuzzFeed article was published, saying that he has been working towards making amends ever since becoming sober two years ago. [20] However, several women countered this claim, reporting that he made inappropriate advances during the time period he claimed to be sober. [21] Days later, he deleted his apology, and proclaimed his innocence in a blog post that also announced his new company, LightPitch. [22]
One immediate reaction was by the VR/AR Association (VRARA), stating: "In light of recent news and allegations of sexual harassment by Robert Scoble, the VR/AR Association has formally removed Robert from our Board of Advisors. Our organization does not condone harassment of any kind, and feel that this is the best course of action." [23]
Scoble resigned from the Transformation Group, his AR consulting firm, which he co-founded in late 2016. [24]
In November, 2013, Scoble was co-keynote speaker with Shel Israel at the 2013 Telstra Australian Digital Summit. Scoble and Israel talked to their book titled "Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy". [25]
On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool's spoof claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot. [26]
On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at NewTeeVee Live [27] featuring other internet celebrities such as Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin Kan, and others. [28]
On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a Chinese Software Professionals Association event called "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing". [29]
In September 2008, Follow cost, a website that calculated how annoying it would be to follow anyone on Twitter, invented the milliscoble unit of measurement defined as: "1/1000 of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25, 2008." At that time, Scoble was averaging 21.21 tweets per day, so a milliscoble is 0.02121 tweets per day. A person with a milliscoble rating of 1000 will be as annoying to follow as Scoble. [30]
He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. Although he considers himself an agnostic, he converted to Islam at the time of the marriage. [31] He has three sons, one with autism. [32]
We live in a time when most people don't trust big companies.
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Microsoft's best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, and the Edge web browser. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Microsoft ranked No. 14 in the 2022 Fortune 500 rankings of the largest United States corporations by total revenue; it was the world's largest software maker by revenue as of 2022. It is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta Platforms.
Blogger is an American online content management system founded in 1999 which enables its users to write blog with time-stamped entries. Pyra Labs developed it before being acquired by Google in 2003. Google hosts the blogs, which can be accessed through a subdomain of blogspot.com. Blogs can also be accessed from a user-owned custom domain by using DNS facilities to direct a domain to Google's servers. A user can have up to 100 blogs or websites per account.
SugarCRM is a software company based in Silicon Valley. It produces the on-premises and cloud-based web application Sugar, a customer relationship management (CRM) system.
Kathy Sierra is an American programming instructor and game developer.
Mini-Microsoft is a blog that was maintained by an anonymous author who appeared to be a Microsoft employee. The site credited its sole author as "Who da'Punk", but many readers referred to him as "Mini" or "Mini-Microsoft". The nominal goal of the blog was to shrink Microsoft down to a smaller, more efficient company, but the blog also served as a forum where Microsoft employees and others engaged in discussion about the company and about its corporate culture. It was last updated in 2014.
Shel Israel is a writer and speaker on social media issues.
Rackspace Technology, Inc. is an American cloud computing company based in Windcrest, Texas, an inner suburb of San Antonio, Texas. The company also has offices in Blacksburg, Virginia, and Austin, Texas, as well as in Australia, Canada, United Kingdom, India, Dubai, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Singapore, Mexico, and Hong Kong. Its data centers are located in Amsterdam (Netherlands), Virginia (USA), Chicago (USA), Dallas (USA), London (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), Hong Kong (China), Kansas City (USA), New York City (USA), San Jose (USA), Shanghai (China), Queenstown (Singapore), and Sydney (Australia).
Andrew E. Rubin is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and venture capitalist. Rubin founded Android Inc. in 2003, which was acquired by Google in 2005; Rubin served as a Google vice president for 9 years and led Google's efforts in creating and promoting the Android operating system for mobile phones and other devices during most of his tenure. Rubin left Google in 2014 after allegations of sexual misconduct, although it was presented as a voluntary departure rather than a dismissal at first. Rubin then served as co-founder and CEO of venture capital firm Playground Global from 2015–2019. Rubin also helped found Essential Products in 2015, a mobile phone start-up that closed in 2020 without finding a buyer.
Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers (ISBN 978-0-471-74719-2), is a book written by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, published in 2006 by John Wiley & Sons. The book is about how blogs, bloggers and the blogosphere is changing how businesses communicate with their consumers and other stakeholders. The authors discuss more than 50 case studies of companies and business leaders, some that have been helped and hurt by their interactions with bloggers and encourages businesses about the best and most successful ways of blogging.
The Rackspace Cloud is a set of cloud computing products and services billed on a utility computing basis from the US-based company Rackspace. Offerings include Cloud Storage, virtual private server, load balancers, databases, backup, and monitoring.
Jungle Disk is both the name of an online backup software service and a privately held data security company. It was one of the first backup services to use cloud storage and Amazon S3. In 2009 after being acquired by Rackspace the service added Rackspace Cloud Files. The name is a word association as the Amazon rainforest is a Jungle and Disk is a common shorthand for a hard disk drive.
Bleeding Cool is an Internet news site, focusing on comics, television, film, board games, and video games. Owned by Avatar Press, it was launched by Rich Johnston on March 27, 2009. Avatar Press also publishes an associated magazine, also called Bleeding Cool.
Gina Marie Trapani is an American tech blogger, web developer, writer, and technology executive.
David "Dave" McClure is an entrepreneur and angel investor based in the San Francisco Bay Area, who founded the business accelerator 500 Startups, serving as CEO until his resignation in 2017. He founded Practical Venture Capital soon after, a new venture capital fund that will continue to work with companies he previously funded through 500 Startups.
Irina Slutsky is an American journalist, vlogger, and early pioneer in web series.
Sexism in the technology industry is overt, subtle, or covert occupational sexism which makes the technology industry less friendly, less accessible, and less profitable for women. While the participation of women in the tech industry varies by region, it is generally around 4% to 20% depending on the measure used. Possible causes that have been studied by researchers include gender stereotypes, investment influenced by those beliefs, a male-dominated environment, a lack of awareness about sexual harassment, and the culture of the industry itself. Margaret O'Mara, a professor of history at the University of Washington, in 2019 concluded that Silicon Valley is uniquely influential locale that is shaping our world. But she points to problematic failures regarding diversity. Male oligopolies of high-tech power have recreated traditional environments that repress the talents and ambitions of women, people of color, and other minorities to the benefit of whites and Asian males.
UVR Media, LLC is an American media company that operates UploadVR, a virtual reality-focused trade publication website.
Tilt Brush is a room-scale 3D-painting virtual-reality application available from Google, originally developed by Skillman & Hackett.
Hillel Fuld is an American Israeli technology business advisor, blogger, and vlogger. Fuld's work focuses on the Israeli high tech industry, guidance for startup companies, and marketing tips for growing a business or personal brands.
Niniane Wang is an American software engineer and technology executive. In her early career at Google, Wang co-created Google Desktop and created Google Lively. She was previously vice president of engineering of Niantic after her company Evertoon was acquired by Niantic in 2017.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown (link)Scoble noted that he's an 'agnostic Muslim' and by no means a faithful follower of the faith he now holds, but none the less, legally he is a Muslim.