For this week’s Meet The Team post, we’re excited to introduce our newest member of the Zemanta family, Kris Smith! Kris is our new Sales Engineer working together both with our sales team in NY as well as our development team in Ljubljana, Slovenia and is the first tech hire for the NY office. Kris comes with tremendous experience in the world of web, publishing and audio, with recent positions such as VP of Product Development at BlogTalkRadio. In his spare time, he’s dabbling in the world of high-end speakers with his son at Gotham and Son.
In a few sentences – Who are you?
My background is diverse and filled with mystery and intrigue. Well, the reality is, not so much.
I cut my teeth in the computer world doing audio work. That progressed into front-end web work, cms development and aggregation. I’ve also done quite a bit product development and I recently began making stereo speakers with my son.
Been married 16 years, son 11, daughter 7. I grow much facial hair.
Oh, and I podcasted with my wife for nearly 8 years at Croncast.com.
Where did you go grow up?
In a small midwestern town where I fished in creeks, raced BMX (top 10 year old in Illinois 1984) and grew the precursor to the mullet, a ‘rat tale’, with pride.
Who are your influences?
An example would be someone like Dave Winer - he’s been a huge influence on me. Anyone that is solving problems with simplicity.
What is your role at Zemanta?
One that is salesy and nerdy. It’s perfect fit.
It’s a role that encompasses nearly all the the skills I’ve gained over my career – Sales Engineer. I work with the sales and technical teams to implement campaigns, create revenue models, provide specs of further infrastructure improvements, content aggregation and evangelize for our products.
How did you get involved with Zemanta?
A few years ago I came across Zemanta and it made a significant difference for me. At the time I was doing a project where I was writing five three-hundred+ word posts a day. It shortened the time I spent looking for resource links, images and best of all it had a killer tagging feature. I could focus on making my articles better without being distracted – a better process for me.
Then shortly after beginning to use the tools I started meeting the Zemanta people at podcasting and blogging events. Our ideas and philosophies around publishing were vary similar. The rest is history!
Related articles
