NowPublic Advisors
NowPublic has a seasoned team of advisors including:
Guy Kawasaki
Guy Kawasaki is a managing director of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm and a columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine. Previously, he was an Apple Fellow at Apple Computer, Inc. Guy is the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way. He has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.
Howard Rheingold
Howard Rheingold is truly a giant among pioneers of internet culture. Howard is best at exlaining his thinking, accomplishments and interests. His bio begins with this:”I fell into the computer realm from the typewriter dimension, then plugged my computer into my telephone and got sucked into the net. In earlier years, my interest in the powers of the human mind led to Higher Creativity (1984), written with Willis Harman, Talking Tech (1982) and The Cognitive Connections (1986) with Howard Levine Excursions to the Far Side of the Mind: A Book of Memes (1988), Exploring the World of Lucid Dreaming (1990), with Stephen LaBerge, and They Have A Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and phrases.(1988).”
Read his complete bio here.
Merrill Brown
Before establishing MMB Media LLC, Brown served as Senior Vice President, RealOne Services from August 2002 through August 2003 and was responsible for all facets of the RealOne programming business including programming, subscription sales, marketing, advertising sales and technology.
Brown became the first Editor in Chief of MSNBC.com in August 1996 after serving as acting managing editor for the July launch of the service. He became Sr. Vice President in August 2000. During his tenure, the fledgling company grew to become one of the most visited news offerings on the Web, maintaining a position as the No. 1 online news provider since 1999.
J.D. Lasica
J.D. Lasica is one of the world’s leading authorities on grassroots media and the personal media revolution. A writer, blogger and consultant, he is the co-founder and executive director of Ourmedia.org. His book about the personal media revolution is Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation (Wiley & Sons, May 2005). J.D. was an editor at the Sacramento Bee for 11 years, has written articles about technology and culture for major publications, and headed up editorial teams at three startups.
His articles are online here. He blogs at New Media Musings, Darknet and Social Media. He lives with his wife and son in the San Francisco Bay Area and is a frequent speaker and panelist at technology and media conferences.
Dries Buytaert
Dries Buytaert is the founder of Drupal, a highly scaleable and modular open source web application development platform. More than 40,000 people have joined Drupal.org, and the project is maintained and developed by more than 300 active contributors. An extremely powerful yet flexible system, Drupal powers a wide variety of websites. Drupal was the software behind ‘Deanspace’ which revolutionized U.S. Presidential races and enabled Howard Dean to transform modern politics. Companies like Yahoo! and Skype and eBay use Drupal to support their operations and sites like Ecademy.com and TheOnion.com have built their sites with Drupal.
Dries has a degree in Computer Science with honors from the University of Antwerp and he is currently completing a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Ghent where he is sponsored by the Institute for the Promotion of Innovation by Science and Technology in Flanders. Dries’ research covers several areas of dynamic and adaptive optimization technologies in the context of Java, the core theme of which is runtime code generation, profiling and instrumentation.
David S. Rose
David S. Rose is an entrepreneurial executive and investor with extensive experience in high technology and communications, venture investments, finance and government.He was named by Inc. magazine to the 1998 Inc 500 list as CEO of one of the fastest growing private companies in America. Red Herring magazine has described him as “a patriarch of New York’s Silicon Alley” for his early leadership in developing the city’s high technology corridor and Crain’s New York Business named him one of the City’s 25 most influential technology executives.
During the course of his career, Mr. Rose has supervised the creation of an intellectual property portfolio of issued patents appraised at over $100 million, and negotiated both domestic and international corporate acquisitions. He was a prime author of the new data messaging protocols for the personal communications industry, and lectures frequently on issues relating to the development of the international information infrastructure.
Jon Whelan
Jon Whelan, a founding member of the New York Angels, has a proven track record developing, marketing and selling media and technology applications. At H&R Communications (now Hart-Hanks) he helped create successful interactive direct mail applications for large healthcare clients. As a member of Oracle’s Business Alliance Program he recruited business partners and worked with them to leverage Oracle technology and drive revenue.
In 1996 he co-founded New York City based ExtraActive, Inc., a forerunner in custom web software development and an application service provider (ASP) that built and managed secure applications for many Fortune 500 companies. A keen understanding of web technology, coupled with market insight, led to the development of Afternic, a popular online marketplace that was spun out of ExtraActive and sold to Register.com in 2000. Jon is currently a principal of Net Return, Inc. and serves as a director of the Media Tile Corporation and Koolspan, Inc., in addition to advising several early stage companies. Jon has a M.B.A. in Information Technology & International Business from Fordham University, as well as a B.S. in Marketing.
Michael Goff
For the past 15 years Michael Goff has built traditional and digital media properties. Last year he partnered with Dan Gillmor to launch Bayosphere, a citizen journalism site for the Bay Area which was acquired by BackFence. He works with assorted bloggers, entrepreneurs, and others through his company Megalomedia, Inc.
Starting out in magazines, he worked on launches for Hearst,. Esquire, McCalls and ultimately founded Out magazine and built it into the most widely read gay/lesbian publication. Establishing Out.com was part of an early involvement with the internet that led Goff to become Editorial Director for the launch of Microsoft’s Sidewalk city guides. He went on as a General Manager to launch MSN’s first iteration free to the web.
