Speaker : Mark Fletcher

VP & General Manager of Bloglines, Ask Jeeves
Blog : WingedPig

Mark is a successful serial entrepreneur, software developer and investor, with over 20 years experience in software development and high tech. Mark's career in high tech begin in the early 1980s. Since then, he has worked in several areas of computer science, including graphics, visualization and medical systems. Mark has been on the Internet since the late 1980s and is an expert on email systems and scalable Internet services.

  In 1997, Mark started ONElist, a free Internet email list service. To that point, email lists had been difficult to set up and administer. Through ONElist,  Mark set out to make email lists available to even novice users. As CEO, Mark raised money from CMGI and Bertelsmann Ventures in 1998. The service was the category leader from the beginning and in November 1999, ONElist acquired eGroups, its main competition. Yahoo acquired the resulting company, renamed eGroups, in June 2000 and the service is now called Yahoo Groups. At acquisition, eGroups served twenty million active users, one million email lists, and sent out over two billion email messages a month, making it one of the largest services on the Internet. Mark served as CEO of ONElist from inception until October 1999 and was CTO until the acquisition by Yahoo.   

  Prior to ONElist, Mark was a Senior Software Engineer for Sun Microsystems, where he worked on web enabled set top boxes. He came to Sun through the acquisition of Diba, a Menlo Park, CA startup working to develop an embedded web surfing software and hardware system. At Diba, Mark developed key embedded web browser technologies.   

Mark was awarded the 2005 Wired Tech Innovator Rave Award. He has appeared on ZDTV and has been featured in numerous newspapers and magazines, including The Wall Street Journal, The San Jose Mercury News, Time Magazine, Red Herring Magazine, Upside Magazine, the Industry Standard, Salon, PC World, the New York Times, and Business Week. Mark has presented at several conferences and has lectured at the University of San Francisco.

Mark has a private pilot's license and hopes to one day get his instrument rating and learn to fly acrobatics (although not at the same time). He is owned by two cats, but he only blogs about them when he's about to make a big announcement.

Finally, Mark thinks that writing about himself in the third person is silly and pretentious. But he did it anyways.

In 2003, Mark started Bloglines, a free web-based news aggregation service. Using Bloglines, users can search, subscribe to, share and publish blogs and RSS feeds. With the goal of becoming the Universal Inbox for average Internet users, Bloglines is the most popular news aggregator on the Internet. Bloglines was named one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Web Sites for 2004, and was named the Best Blog/Feed Search Engine by the Search Engine Watch Awards in 2005. In February, 2005, Bloglines was acquired by Ask Jeeves, and Mark is currently VP & General Manager of Bloglines at Ask Jeeves.