Introduction
Robert Scoble (born January 18, 1965) is an American blogger, technical evangelist, and author. Scoble is best known for his blog, Scobleizer, which came to prominence during his tenure as a technology evangelist at Microsoft. He later worked for Fast Company as a video blogger, and then Rackspace and the Rackspace sponsored community site Building 43 promoting breakthrough technology and startups. He currently works for Upload VR — a new media site covering virtual and augmented reality — as its entrepreneur in residence, where he develops new shows, events, and works with other entrepreneurs in the Upload Collective, a co-working space for virtual reality-focused startups.
Early life and education
Scoble was born in New Jersey in 1965, and grew up about a kilometer from Apple Computer’s head office in Silicon Valley.
In 1993 he dropped out without finishing his degree in Journalism from San Jose State University’s School of Journalism and Mass Communications.
Career
Microsoft
In June 2003 Scoble accepted a position at Microsoft. The Economist described Scoble’s influence in its February 15, 2005 edition:
On June 10, 2006, Scoble announced he was leaving Microsoft to join Podtech.net as vice president of media development with a higher salary accompanied by "a quite aggressive stock option" offer that would have made him wealthy if his new company had succeeded. According to Alexa Internet that day had the biggest traffic to his blog and PodTech over their lifetime. June 28, 2006 was his last day at Microsoft.
Fast Company
On December 11, 2007, while taking part in a panel discussion at the LeWeb3 Conference, Scoble inadvertently leaked news (by loading up a post on TechCrunch) that he would be leaving PodTech on January 14, 2008, and was likely to join Fast Company. He acknowledged the news on his blog on December 12 but stated that he had not yet signed on with Fast Company. He did a video interview about his plans and leased studio space from Revision3.
On March 3, 2008, Scoble launched FastCompany.tv with two shows: FastCompany Live and ScobleizerTV. He characterizes the first as "a show done totally on cell phones." The second is similar to his previous show on PodTech, only with better equipment and a camera operator. The show is recorded with two cameras in 720p HD.
Rackspace and Building 43
On March 14, 2009, Scoble announced via his blog and on the Gillmor Gang that he was joining Rackspace. As part of his work there, he teamed up with the company to develop Building 43, a new content and social networking website aimed to help grow new startups and promote groundbreaking technology. In 2012, Building 43 was re-branded as Small Teams, Big Impact. Scoble’s mission remains to find and report bleeding edge technology.
UploadVR
On March 10, 2016, Robert Scoble announced via his blog that he will be joining UploadVR. April 4, 2016 will be his last day at Rackspace.
Appearances
In November, 2013, Scoble was co-keynote speaker with Shel Israel at the 2013 Telstra Australian Digital Summit. Scoble and Israel talked to their book titled "Age of Context: Mobile, Sensors, Data and the Future of Privacy".
On April 1, 2008, The Register ran an April fool’s spoof claiming Robert Scoble was actually an IBM bot.
On November 14, 2007, he was a contestant on a game show at NewTeeVee Live featuring other internet celebrities such as Veronica Belmont, Casey McKinnon, Cali Lewis, Kevin Rose, Justin Kan, and others.
On November 6, 2006, Scoble appeared as a panelist on a Chinese Software Professionals Association event called "The New Age of Influence: The Impact of Social Computing on Media and Marketing".
Milliscoble
In September 2008, Follow cost, a website which calculated how annoying it would be to follow anyone on Twitter, invented the milliscoble unit of measurement defined as: "1/1000 of the average daily Twitter status updates by Robert Scoble as of 10:09 CST September 25, 2008." At that time, Scoble was averaging 21.21 tweets per day, so a milliscoble is 0.02121 tweets per day. A person with a milliscoble rating of 1000 will be as annoying to follow as Scoble.
Personal life
He is married to Maryam Ghaemmaghami Scoble. He converted to Islam (although he considers himself to be an agnostic) at the time of the marriage. He has three sons, Patrick, Milan and Ryan; one of whom is from a previous marriage and the others with Maryam; one of whom is autistic.