Blog Detail
Guardedly Skeptimistic
http://blog.roberthoffer.com/
An entrepreneur and innovator for more than 20 years, Robert Hoffer is the name you don’t know behind some of the biggest commercial successes on the Internet – from online yellow pages, to instant messaging, to web-based scratch-off games. Robert has worked with, consulted at, and created successful technologies for some of the world’s best known companies, including Apple Computer, AOL, Xerox, PepsiCo, Playboy, Citibank, and Lipton. His experience spans virtually every industry, from Internet and technology to automotive , health care, banking, real estate, advertising, publishing, education and entertainment.
A strategic thinker with extensive expertise in marketing, operations, finance, and business development, Robert’s deepest passion is for innovation. This passion began in 1984, when he sold the first Mac to Grey Advertising – sparking a trend that would redefine the practices of advertising and graphic design agencies. Holder of several patents, Robert’s technology bias and marketing vision have inspired products that are used by millions and purchased by companies like Yahoo and Microsoft.
Over the course of his career, Robert has co-founded several successful Internet companies, including: Infospace Corp., an Internet directory services provider; Query Labs, offering third-party directory services to newspapers and media firms; and Typo.net, which launched the concept of interstitial advertising. In 1995, Robert created the first web-based national Yellow and White pages which was licensed and co-branded with Yahoo, Nynex, American Express, Excite@Home, Lycos, and others. As the co-founder of ActiveBuddy in 2000, a company he built from the ground up, Robert created the first commercially viable online robot for instant messaging. Robert was awarded three patent for ActiveBuddy’s pioneering work, US Patent 6,430,602, US Patent 7,146,404, and US Patent 6,993,555. In 2006, Microsoft purchased ActiveBuddy (now Colloquis) for $46 million.
Today, Robert serves as co-founder and managing director of two emerging companies: Newforth Partners, a technology-focused investment banking and consulting firm, and Nerds.com, a full service interactive development agency.
Recent Posts
I Want My…I Want My…
I want my ATV! And by that I mean a television that has an Apple logo on it. And iTunes. And I don’t want it as a box – I want it IN the box. You may have noticed that LG just announced and shipped a flat panel TV with a hard drive that reads...
Selling The Cash Cow: 2Little 2Late!
Now that AOL has failed entirely to morph from a dial-up provider into a broadband services provider, the idea that it will sell its access business is an example of a late-breaking, collective corporate “duh.” The question is - who’...
iTouch on Cannibalizing Your Own Market
Anyone can build an iTunes clone – anyone. I know this because I did it myself. I have an Apple TV - a Sonos - a Netgear Digital Entertainer EVA8000 - and an iPhone. Guess what? I can control the Netgear DE easily with its HTML interface on my iPho...
I AM COMMANDER PIKE!
False boundaries are a theme of mine. Longstanding notions of boundaries - such as what defines a nation or what defines a generation - are hackneyed, and I believe we should recategorize them. Take demographics: (Click on image to enlarge) The cate...
InterOp - Yawn … With a Silver Lining …
In May, I attended the 2007 Las Vegas Interop Show. It was loaded with security systems, virtualization apps, lots of switches … after a day you could have wheeled me out on a gurney. It was so dull, frankly, that I couldn’t find anything...
New Ideas? Why Bother!!!!
Whether it’s that the collective memory of the nation is too short or that the youthful souls of the Web 2.0 movement are just too young to remember, they have knocked off yet another early idea: The Blogathon. You may have heard of my old frie...

