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Robert Scoble is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble first came to prominence during his tenure as a technical evangelist at [[Microsoft]], due to his blog "Scobleizer." ==Early life== Scoble grew up in Silicon Valley. His father was an engineer at Ampex and Lockheed Martin. His mother worked for [[Apple Inc]] as a member of a group of women who built Apple IIs at home. Robert learned how to solder a motherboard together when he was 11 and helped his mother build several hundred Apple IIs. He studied journalism at West Valley Community College and San Jose State. In 1989 he persuaded [[Steve Wozniak]] to donate $40,000 worth of Macintoshes to the WVCC journalism department, and then took responsibility for setting them all up. At that time he was a Mac Evangelist, fond of installing beta software and performing weird hacks on other people's old Apple computers to improve their performance. ==Career== After college Scoble worked for Fawcette Technical Publications and then for Winnov, a manufacturer of webcams. His job supporting webcam users led him to be active in Microsoft's NetMeeting support newsgroups, for which activity he was named a Microsoft MVP. He left Fawcette to join [[Dave Winer]]'s UserLand Software, a blogging software startup, as Director of Marketing, until the startup ran out of money. He found a job at NEC Mobile Solutions as Sales Support Manager for TabletPC, where he used a blog to provide tech support and listen to feedback from NEC customers. This blog was noticed by Vic Gundotra, then General Manager of Platform Evangelism at Microsoft, who invited Robert to work at Microsoft. Scoble joined Microsoft in 2003 as part of the Channel 9 MSDN Video team, producing videos that showcased Microsoft employees and products. While promoting Microsoft products like Tablet PCs and Windows Vista, Scoble also frequently criticized his own employer and praised competitors. His blog offered an unusual level of access, including accepting comments from readers, and publishing his cell phone number inviting people to contact him directly with issues. He helped Microsoft appear less evil to the independent software developers that were his core audience. In February 2005 he was the first person to be called the newly-coined term "spokesblogger." In 2006 Scoble announced he was leaving Microsoft to join Podtech.net as vice president of media development. At Podtech he produced the [http://www.podtech.net/scobleshow Scoble Show]. In early 2008 he left PodTech and joined Fast Company, where he launched FastCompany.tv with two shows. The first was FastCompany Live, which was done totally on cell phones. The second, ScobleizerTV, was similar to his previous show on PodTech, only with better equipment and a camera operator. FastCompany laid Scoble off in March 2009. He currently works for Rackspace and is building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building 43. He is also the co-author of Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers with Shel Israel. He supported Kathy Sierra when she was victim of hostile posts. ==Links== *Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Scoble *Scoble's blog: http://scobleizer.com *Building 43 website: http://www.building43.com *Twitter: http://twitter.com/scobleizer *Friendfeed: http://friendfeed.com/scobleizer [[Category:People]] [[Category:Bloggers]]
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