A Whiting-Turner Lecture:
"The Business of Social Media"

Hooman Radfar, CEO and co-founder of Clearspring, will give the first Whiting-Turner lecture of the spring semester on April 2. Date: April 2 Time: 5 p.m. Location: 1110 Kim Engineering Building

Abstract
Social media is dead. Long live social media. That's the theme of the CEO of the web's largest-reaching social distribution company, Clearspring Technologies. Social networking and publishing platforms like Facebook, Wordpress, and MySpace are taking the world by storm. The web is no longer a mechanism for simple publishing. It has become the platform for delivering users services via APIs, widgets, and applications. Social media is not a new category of media. All media online is swiftly becoming social. Hooman Radfar will discuss the changing media landscape, the forces driving the changes, and how Internet companies can succeed in this brave new world.

Biography
Hooman Radfar, 28, is founder & CEO of Clearspring Technologies. Radfar co-founded Clearspring in 2004 after graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with an M.S. in Electrical Engineering. At Clearspring, he drives platform and strategy initiatives, where he helps major media companies and marketers, such as NBC Universal, NBA, Time, Turner, and Disney efficiently distribute and track their content across the web.

Radfar has been working in the social media space for more than five years. During this period he has been dedicated to defining the standards, economic models, and innovation that define the next phase of the web, loosely termed as Web 2.0/3.0. At Clearspring, he aims to create the platform and business models for the distributed web and allow its participants to share in the huge upside of this new ecosystem.

BusinessWeek.com featured Radfar as one of "The Wizards of Widgets" and named him one of "Technology's Best Young Entrepreneurs" most likely to shape the world's digital future. He was also nominated for Ernst & Young’s "Entrepreneur of the Year." He is a frequent speaker at technology conferences including Widgets Live, Web 2.0 Expo, and WidgetCon. He is often quoted in major media, including The Washington Post, BusinessWeek and Red Herring. When he is not busy building a better Web, you can find him writing his blog Widgify.

Radfar graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with degrees in economics and computer science. He also received an M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University, where he researched social networks and distributed systems.

Students Welcome!

April 2, 2009
5 p.m.
1110 Kim Building

Can't Attend?

This lecture will be webcast.

Visit the Whiting-Turner Lecture Series Homepage