TechCrunch Columnists
Cyan is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of Zivity, and also a contributing columnist for TechCrunch.
Cyan was born into a family of artists and grew up around paint, photography and music. From these beginnings, she developed a life-long appreciation for the arts that eventually inspired the Zivity platform. This platform she created is a new way for artists to profitably connect directly with their fans in the rapidly changing digital media landscape.
Cyan has held many leadership roles throughout her career, from leading technical operations teams in an enterprise software company to helping women master technology as CTO of a nonprofit organization.
Chris Dixon currently works as the CEO and Co-founder of Hunch. He is also a contributing columnist for TechCrunch.
He previously was the CEO and Co-founder of SiteAdvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. Chris is a personal investor in early-stage technology companies, including Skype, TrialPay, DocVerse, Invite Media, Gerson Lehrman Group, ScanScout, OMGPOP, BillShrink, Oddcast, Panjiva, Knewton, and a handful of other startups that are still in stealth mode. In addition to his personal investments, Chris is also a co-founder of Founder’s Collective.
Jon Evans is an author, journalist, and software engineer.
His novels have won an Arthur Ellis Award, translation into half a dozen languages, and praise from The Economist, The Times, and The Washington Post. His journalism has appeared in Wired, The Guardian, Reader’s Digest, The Globe and Mail, and The Times of India, and he writes a weekly column for TechCrunch.
He also has a degree in electrical engineering and a decade of experience as a software developer, building everything from smartphone apps to billion-dollar asset-allocation services. He lives in Toronto and at rezendi.com.
Steve Gillmor is a technology commentator, editor, and producer in the enterprise technology space. He is Head of Technical Media Strategy at salesforce.com and a TechCrunch contributing editor.
Gillmor previously worked with leading musical artists including Paul Butterfield, David Sanborn, and members of The Band after an early career as a record producer and filmmaker with Columbia Records’ Firesign Theatre. As personal computers emerged in video and music production tools, Gillmor started contributing to various publications, most notably Byte Magazine, where he was a lead reviewer of development and collaborative platform systems including Visual Basic, Lotus Notes, Microsoft Office, and Windows NT. Subsequently, Gillmor served as a contributing editor at InformationWeek Labs, before joining Fawcette Technical Publications first as Senior Editor and later as Editor in Chief of Enterprise Development Magazine, and then Editor in Chief and Editorial Director of XML and Java Pro Magazines.
Andrew Keen is an Anglo-American entrepreneur, writer, broadcaster and public speaker. He is the author of the international hit “Cult of the Amateur: How the Internet is Killing our Culture” which has been published in 17 different languages and was short-listed for the Higham’s Business Technology Book of the Year award. As a pioneering Silicon Valley based Internet entrepreneur, Andrew founded Audiocafe.com in 1995 and built it into a popular first generation Internet music company. He is currently the host of “Keen On” show, the popular TechCrunch chat show.
Andrew is an acclaimed speaker on the international circuit, speaking regularly on the impact of new technology on 21st century business, education and society. Andrew’s new book about the social media revolution, “Digital Vertigo”, will be published by St Martin’s Press in 2012.
MG Siegler is a general partner at CrunchFund and a columnist for TechCrunch, where he has been writing since 2009. His focus is on Apple.
Prior to TechCrunch, MG covered various technology beats for VentureBeat.
Originally from Ohio, MG attended the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI. He’s previously lived in Los Angeles where he worked in Hollywood and in San Diego where he worked in web development. He also writes at his own blog, ParisLemon, and tweets a lot.
He now lives in San Francisco.
Dr. Serkan Toto currently works as the first and only Asia-based writer for the TechCrunch network, mainly covering Japan-related technology and web companies for TechCrunch, CrunchGear and MobileCrunch.
Serkan also works full-time as an independent web and mobile industry consultant with a focus on the Japanese market.
He is sept-lingual, holds an MBA and is a PhD in economics. Serkan is a German of Turkish descent and lives in Tokyo.
TechCrunch Contributors
Mike Abbott joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as a partner in 2011. He focuses on investments in the firm’s digital practice, helping entrepreneurs in the social, mobile and cloud computing sectors rapidly scale teams and ventures. Mike serves as an expert resource on enterprise infrastructure, cloud computing and “big data.” He also helps entrepreneurs win the race for talent in a hyper-competitive recruitment environment.
An engineering leader, entrepreneur and investor, Mike led the building of innovative, high-performance applications and services at Twitter, Palm and Microsoft before he joined KPCB. Mike is also an expert in “big data” businesses, having founded Composite Software. Formerly the vice president of engineering at Twitter, Mike led the team to rebuild and solidify Twitter’s infrastructure, growing the engineering team from 80 to more than 350 engineers in less than a year and a half, and scaling Twitter’s architecture to support 250 million daily tweets. Before joining Twitter, Mike led the software development team at Palm that created HP/Palm’s next-generation webOS platform. Earlier in his career, Mike was the general manager at Microsoft for .NET online services, which became Azure. He was also co-founder of Passenger Inc. Mike has advised and invested in numerous software companies throughout his career, including Cloudera, Hearsay Labs, Jawbone and Saynow.
J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news.
Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati. His clients included idealab, Netscape, Pixar, Apple and a number of startups, venture funds and investment banks. He also co-authored a book on initial public offerings.
In 1999, he left WSGR to join RealNames as VP of Business Development and General Counsel. In 2000, he cofounded Achex, an online payments company, that was later acquired by First Data Corp for $32 million. Achex is now the back end infrastructure to Western Union online.
Arrington worked in an operational role at a Carlyle backed startup in London, founded and ran two companies in Canada (Zip.ca and Pool.com), was COO to a Kleiner-backed company called Razorgator, and consulted to other companies, including Verisign.
In May 2008, Time Magazine named Michael Arrington as one of the world’s 100 most influential people.
James is a contributing writer to TechCrunch. He is CEO and co-founder at 140Labs. He is also an investor in Buddy Media and bit.ly.
Devin Coldewey is a Seattle-based writer and photographer. He has written for the TechCrunch network since 2007.
Some posts he’d like you to read: The Dangers of Externalizing Knowledge | Generation i | Surveillant Society | Choose Two | Frame Wars | The User’s Manifesto | Our Great Sin
Romain Dillet is a contributor at TechCrunch.
Originally from France, Romain attended EMLYON Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He covers many things from mobile apps with great designs to complicated tech achievements. He is a pop culture devotee.
He now lives in Lyon and likes to cover New York startups as he used to live there.
Klint Finley is a technology journalist working for TechCrunch.
He has also contributed to publications such as Wired, ReadWriteWeb, Disinfo and Shift.
Billy Gallagher is a contributor for TechCrunch.
He is also the president and editor in chief of The Stanford Daily.
Billy previously worked at The Stanford Daily for two volumes as a managing editor of news. He has also worked in sports and staff development at The Daily. In March of 2012 the Friends of The Stanford Daily awarded him the Julius Jacobs Award for “excellent reporting and writing skills, and dedication to The Stanford Daily.”
Billy is on track to graduate from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics in 2014.
Ansel Halliburton is a lawyer at ComputerLaw Group, a boutique law firm in Palo Alto specializing in intellectual property litigation and entrepreneurship.
Ansel started programming at age ten, and began his career as a startup programmer during college. Shortly before the dot-com crash, he presented his work on the floor of the Comdex trade show in Las Vegas, and later worked with a global team on an award-winning web application.
Eventaully, Ansel realized that he liked to write prose more than code, and began to transition into the legal field. After working as a paralegal in intellectual property litigation, Ansel became the second employee of the Stanford IP Litigation Clearinghouse (since spun out as Lex Machina), where he found himself building software again. There, he wrote specialized web crawlers and a rules engine that powered the world’s most comprehensive database of patent litigation. He also met with lawyers and judges, managed analysts, and traveled to Wisconsin in the middle of the winter to obtain key court records that were not available electronically.
Justin Kan is an entrepreneur, Web developer, and the ‘Justin’ of Justin.tv.
Justin.tv started when Justin Kan and Emmett Shear took on the challenge of broadcasting one person’s life 24/7. The Justin.tv website launched in March of 2007. Prior to Justin.tv, Justin Kan and his fellow co-founders created a calendar startup called Kiko.
He is currently working on a new mobile video application called Socialcam.
Tadhg is a senior video game designer, producer and creative director.
Tadhg has held roles at various video game development, technology and publishing companies. Since the early 90s, Tadhg has worked on all sorts of game projects, from boardgames and live action roleplaying games through to multi-million dollar PC projects. He has served as lead designer, senior producer and a number of other roles at several companies including BSkyB, Lionhead and Climax.
Tadhg is also a published games industry commentator, having been featured in several key industry publications. He is also a noted blogger.
Tadhg spends his time working with Simple Lifeforms defining our vision for social game-play, designing our signature social games and consulting for various video game development companies on their game development and design strategies.
Steve Patterson’s writing and observations are based on his 20 years working with start-ups in Boston and Silicon Valley. He graduated from Boston College with a degree in Mathematics.
A contributor to organizations such as TechCrunch, Network World, CIO, MHT, Byte and RH. He is interested in mobile and cloud technology companies and everything in between.
Ross Rubin is principal analyst at Reticle Research, which he founded in 2012. Reticle Research analyzes consumer adoption and usage of technology.
Prior to founding Reticle Research, Rubin was executive director of industry analysis for consumer technology at The NPD Group, a market research firm well-known for tracking sales of electronics, PCs, cell phones and other consumer gadgets. Prior to joining NPD, Rubin was vice president and chief research fellow at Jupiter Research, where he founded the firm’s first technology research practice covering Net-connected devices as well as the evolution of broadband and wireless data. Rubin also created the firm’s research report structural guidelines.
Rubin has been a frequent speaker at many industry events, including CES, CTIA and IFA. He has written the Switched On column for Engadget since 2004, and also maintains columns at ABCNews.com, TechCrunch and TUAW.
Currently, operations @rexly Advisor to @dygestnews, @votizen, and @bumptech Guest contributor to @techcrunch and active @quora user Please visit www.semilshah.com for more information.
Catherine Shu is a TechCrunch writer based in Taipei. She started her career in New York City at the Wall Street Journal Online and Barron’s Online before moving to Asia. After studying Mandarin Chinese, Catherine put her language skills to the test by covering the design industry and culture in Taiwan’s capital for the Taipei Times.
Her other journalism experience includes an investigative reporting internship at the Village Voice and numerous freelance writing gigs. Catherine graduated from Sarah Lawrence College and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
Mark joined GRP Partners in 2007 after having worked with GRP for nearly 8 years as a two-time entrepreneur. Most recently Mark was Vice President, Product Management at Salesforce.com (NASDAQ: CRM) following its acquisition of Koral,where Mark was Founder and CEO. Prior to Koral, Mark was Founder and CEO of BuildOnline, the largest independent global content collaboration company focused on the engineering and construction sectors, which was acquired by SWORD Group (PARIS: SWP). Earlier in his career, Mark spent nearly ten years working for Accenture in Europe, Japan and the U.S.
Mark received a BA in Economics from the University of California, San Diego, and an MBA from the University of Chicago. He is a dual citizen of the US and the UK.
Alex Williams is currently an enterprise writer for TechCrunch.
He is a veteran technology blogger, journalist and analyst. He led the cloud and enterprise channels at ReadWriteWeb before joining SiliconAngle, where he worked as a senior editor.
Alex has a masters degree in journalism from Northwestern University and a BA in French Litertature from the University of Denver. He got his start in journalism when he wrote about his experience as a college student playing baseball in France.
He lives in Portland, Oregon.
