Speaker Biographies

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Bill Rosenblatt, Author / Consultant / Managing Editor of DRM Watch

Bill Rosenblatt is a recognized authority on digital media technologies, including content management, digital rights management, cross-media publishing, and content production systems, as well as on issues related to intellectual property in the online world. He has written several articles and contributed to technology standards initiatives in these areas, and he is the author of Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology (John Wiley & Sons) and managing editor of the Jupitermedia newsletter DRM Watch. He was one of the architects of the Digital Object Identifier, an emerging standard for online content identification and digital rights management.

Before founding GiantSteps, Bill was chief technology officer of Fathom, a knowledge destination web site for lifelong learners sponsored by Columbia University, the London School of Economics, Cambridge University Press, the New York Public Library, and other scholarly institutions. Bill defined Fathom's content and e-commerce technology architecture and built its technology infrastructure.

Bill's publishing industry experience includes stints at McGraw-Hill and Times Mirror Co. (now part of Tribune Co.). Before joining Fathom, he served as VP of Technology and New Media for McGraw-Hill's trade magazine division, where he was responsible for implementing the business' vertical market web portal strategy, including AviationNow.com, an information portal for the aviation industry. At Times Mirror, as Director of Publishing Systems, Bill implemented content management systems for many of Times Mirror's newspaper, book, and professional information publishing businesses, and helped develop the editorial system architecture for MDConsult, a web service for physicians.

At Sun Microsystems, Bill served as a technology strategy consultant to Sun's major media and publishing customers in the northeast US, and did business development for Sun's video server product line. Then, as Market Development Manager for the publishing industry, he defined Sun's market strategy for publishing and built alliances with software vendors who serve the industry, including Quark, Vignette, Documentum, Xerox Rights Management (now ContentGuard), MediaDNA (now Macrovision), Unisys Publishing Systems, and CCI Europe. His career in digital media began at Moody's Investors Service, the bond rating agency, where he developed a pre-web-era architecture for electronic publishing of Moody's credit reports based on Lotus Notes and Adobe Acrobat.

Bill has also been active as a writer for several years. In addition to Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology, he is an author of three technical books for the publisher O'Reilly & Associates, which have been translated into French and Japanese; and he was a contributor to the book Electronic Publishing Strategies, published by Pira International Ltd. in the UK. He is a regular guest lecturer on DRM and digital copyright issues at the Franklin Pierce Law Center of New Hampshire.

He was a columnist for the web magazine Unix Insider for over five years, and he has written articles on digital media for The Seybold Report, Salon, Journal of Electronic Publishing, EContent, Serials Review, and other publications; he has spoken at conferences given by several different organizations; and he has been quoted in The New York Times, US News & World Report, Der Spiegel, The Globe and Mail, Editor & Publisher, Information Today, and on NPR's All Things Considered.