Phillip Greenspun: The Most Interesting Man in Massachusetts (#143)

Greenspun grew up in Bethesda, Maryland, and received a B.S. in
Mathematics from MIT in 1982. After working for Hewlett Packard
Research Labs in Palo Alto and Symbolics, he became a founder of
ICAD, Inc. Greenspun returned to MIT to study electrical
engineering and computer science, eventually receiving a Ph.D.
Working with Isaac Kohane of Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard
Medical School, Greenspun was the developer of an early Web-based
electronic medical record system. The system is described in
"Building national electronic medical record systems via the World
Wide Web" (1996).[1] Greenspun and Kohane continue to work together
on a medical informatics at Harvard Medical School. In 1995,
Greenspun was hired to lead development of Hearst Corporation's
Internet services, which included early e-commerce sites. In 1997
he co-founded ArsDigita, a web services company which grew to $20
million in annual revenues by 2000. Photo.net and ArsDigita In
1993, Greenspun founded photo.net, an online community for people
helping each other to improve their photographic skills. He seeded
the community with "Travels with Samantha",[3] a photo-illustrated
account of a trip from Boston to Alaska and back. Photo.net became
a business in 2000 with the help of some of his cofounders Rajeev
Surati and Waikit Lau. Having grown to 600,000 registered users, it
was acquired by NameMedia in 2007 for $6 million, according to
documents filed in connection with a planned public offering of
NameMedia shares. Greenspun founded the open-source software
company ArsDigita and, as CEO, grew it to about $20 million in
revenue before taking a venture capital investment. Greenspun was
an early developer of database-backed Web sites, which became the
dominant approach to engineering sites with user contributions,
e.g., Amazon.com. Greenspun was also a developer of one of the
first Web-based electronic medical record systems. Greenspun's
Oracle-based community site LUSENET was an important early host of
free forums. Aviation Greenspun has written several textbooks on
developing Internet applications, including Philip and Alex's Guide
to Web Publishing,[21] SQL for Web Nerds,[22] and Software
Engineering for Internet Applications,[23] the textbook for an MIT
course. Greenspun is the editor of Medical School 2020, which
provides a first-person account by a medical student.[24] Teaching
Greenspun and his co-founders at ArsDigita started a non-profit
foundation that ran the ArsDigita Prize, an award for young web
developers, and the ArsDigita University, a tuition-free one-year
program teaching the core computer science curriculum, one course
at a time. Winners of the Prize include a 12 year old Aaron
Swartz.[25] Greenspun has taught electrical engineering and
computer science at MIT.[26] One of Greenspun's most famous
students is Randal Pinkett, who built an online community for
low-income housing residents in Greenspun's 6.171 Software
Engineering for Internet Applications course. Pinkett went on to
win NBC TV show The Apprentice. In 2003, And please join my mailing
list to get resources and enter giveaways to win a FREE copy of my
book (and more) http://briankeating.com/mailing_list.php Watch my
most popular videos Frank Wilczek
https://youtu.be/3z8RqKMQHe0?sub_confirmation=1 Weinstein and
Wolfram
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OI0AZ4Y4Ip4?sub_confirmation=1
Sheldon Glashow: https://youtu.be/a0_iaWgxQtA?sub_confirmation=1
Michael Saylor The Physics of Bitcoin
https://youtu.be/CaN_CDKqXOg?sub_confirmation=1 Find me on Twitter
at https://twitter.com/DrBrianKeating A production of
http://imagination.ucsd.edu/ Support the podcast:
https://www.patreon.com/drbriankeating Thanks to our sponsors!
https://magbreakthrough.com/impossiblehttp://betterhelp.com/impossible
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices