Old Pretentious About
By Mark Fletcher
- 2 minutes read - 377 words
Wingedpig.com is the home page for Mark Fletcher. Mark is an Internet entrepreneur, software developer and investor. He currently sits on the board of Techdirt. 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. 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, where Mark served as VP & General Manager of Bloglines until May, 2006. In 1997, Mark started ONElist, a free Internet email list service. Previously, 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. Mark was awarded the 2005 Wired Magazine 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 had a private pilot’s license and was thinking about learning to fly acrobatics, but has since given that up. He lives with his wonderful wife, son, and daughter, along with a dog, four cats, six chickens, and too much technology. Finally, Mark thinks that writing about himself in the third person is silly and pretentious. But he did it anyways. Elsewhere on the web: