NowPublic Blog

An Emmy nominee and successful entrepreneur for almost two decades, Tippett is recognized an as international expert on emerging news models.  In 2005, Tippett co-founded NowPublic.  The company has been named one of the top five most useful new sites on the web by The Guardian and Time magazine named it one of the Top 50 Websites for 2007.

In 1995, Tippett founded the WebPool Syndicate, one of Canada’s first Internet companies.  After the success of the WebPool venture, Tippett travelled to the United States and worked for some of the largest web companies in North America, including TheGlobe.com, Afternic and Register.com.

Outside of his role at NowPublic, Tippett is a member of the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism Advisory Board, Capilano University, Bachelor of Professional Communication Advisory Committee and is also a board member of CABINET, a Vancouver-based arts organization.  He is also an advisor to The Wireless Innovation Network British Columbia (WINBC).

He has also contributed to digital culture in fields such as media arts. In 2004 he collaborated with Kate Armstrong to produce Grafik Dynamo, a net art piece that loads live images from blogs and news sources on the web into a live action comic strip. Grafik Dynamo was a commission of Turbulence, made possible with funding from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

Tippett graduated from Queen’s University with a degree in Philosophy.

Status etc: http://twitter.com/mtippett

Personal Blog: pre.posterous.com / tippett.org

News: http://my.nowpublic.com/mtippett

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/michaeltippett

Leonard is one of Canada’s most respected young technology entrepreneurs. He has helped in raising millions of dollars for startup companies, been through one of the largest internet IPOs in history and has been involved in the building, financing and/or sale of four companies to date. Much critical acclaim has followed him in his endeavours. At Onvia Canada (where he was part of the initial executive) the company was voted Canada’s number one startup in 2000 and subsequently closed a $240 Million NASDAQ IPO. At Marqui (where he was Chief Advisor) the startup was rated as the best new internet company in the country in 2003.

Michael E. Meyers has been working with online and interactive technologies, managing teams across a wide range of industries for over 12 years. Prior to starting NowPublic.com, Michael was the Director of Web Development at Register.com where he was responsible for managing web development for the company’s five business units. Michael joined Register.com in 2001 when the company acquired the startup AfterNIC.com which pioneered the secondary market for domain names. At AfterNIC.com Michael was responsible for product development, managing the day to day operations of the technology team, and the company’s infrastructure.

Before joining AfterNIC as one of the first employees, Michael was the Director of Development at the Ad Week ranked Top 20 interactive agency, Blue Dingo, where he oversaw several multimillion dollar initiatives for major brands including MCI, Volvo, and Diageo / United Distillers and Vintners. Michael was recruited by Blue Dingo to help expand the companies focus beyond traditional online marketing initiatives to developing out robust web applications for some of the world’s top brands. Michael’s first foray into advertising was in the mid 90’s at Stirr Associates, a boutique agency, where he produced second generation websites (the original “web 2.0”) for giants like Olympus America and GlaxoSmithKline.

In the late 90’s when most websites were simple pages with little or no functionality, Michael worked at eXtraActive a bespoke web application development company where he managed the implementation and support of web applications for several startups as well intranets and extranets for fortune 100 corporations including AIG and Time Warner. Through innovative technology solutions eXtraActive helped companies analyze and streamline operations, introducing cost and time efficiencies never before thought possible.

Prior to his work on the web Michael spent several years building video games and interactive cd-roms. Michael served as the project manager on a multimillion dollar game for iNSCAPE, a gaming company in Los Angels owned by Time Warner and HBO and he worked for computer animation pioneer Judson Rosebush, who’s credits include Tron, on several PC Games and interactive titles for companies like Microsoft, CBS, The New York Times, the Smithsonian, and Times Mirror Magazines.

Michael has BS with honors from Ithaca College’s Roy H. Park School of Communications.

In 2007, Michael was elected a permanent member of the General Assembly of the Drupal Association, the not-for-profit organization that helps the Drupal project with fun­ding, infra­structure, events, promotion and distribution.

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.

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.