Time: Saturday May 12 (10:30am-11:15am)
Location: Theatre
Speaker: Michael Jones (Userplane/AOL)
Title: The Web as a Platform
Abstract:
As the Web moves to become a ubiquitous operating system, developers are faced with the challenge of embracing the web as a distributed development platform. In this session, Mike Jones (CEO of Userplane) will discuss the evolution of the platform Web - broadly covering new services, new distribution models, widgets, APIs, industry trends, and its long-term effect on personal computing.
Biographical Information:
Michael Jones, CEO of Userplane and Vice President of AOL, oversees Userplane's business strategy, sales and operations. As a founder of Userplane, and Userplane's CEO, Jones' business leadership brought the business from startup to acquisition by AOL in August 2006. As a Vice President of AOL, he now focuses on the growth of AOL's syndicated application strategy, under the Userplane brand. This includes coordination with a variety of AOL subsidiaries and internal technologies to pioneer distribution to millions of web publishers as well as AOL's strategic positioning as a platform provider to the online community marketplace.
Userplane now supports over 50 million users in more than fifteen countries across 150,000 different web publishers including top tier web properties like myspace.com, date.com, Red Bull, and Honda. Userplane has been recognized as a pioneer in the Web 2.0 movement, one of the inventors of the open widget distribution model as well as one of the largest users of Macromedia Flash and Flash Media Server as core, web-application technologies. In addition, Userplane provided core infrastructure to MySpace since their launch through both communication technologies but also served as MySpace's music playback system for the first 9 months of MySpace Music growth.
A serial entrepreneur, Jones was the founder of Elixir Magazine in 1994, a nationally distributed pop-culture music and entertainment magazine. Subsequently Jones founded his first digital production studio PBJ Digital in 1996 during his junior year at the University of Oregon, which he sold in 2000 after growing the company to profitability. He has since launched numerous business and participates in fund raising, angel investing and as an advisory board member in various online startups.
Jones frequently represents AOL and Userplane at conferences and in publications. Jones was the keynote speaker at the 2007 Online Dating and Social Networking conference, 2003 OFFF conference in Barcelona Spain, a featured presenter at Flash Forward 2003, BlogON 2004, iDate Miami 2004, SITRAS 2004, iDate Nice 2004, iDate Miami 2005, iDate Hong Kong 2005, iDate Miami 2005 and Digital Hollywood 2006. He has also been published in numerous internet journals including iMediaConnection.com.
Jones earned his Bachelor of Arts in International Business and Marketing from the University of Oregon.
