Steve Harmon web entrepreneur
Hi everyone. I am an entrepreneur and investor in the Internet, web and new media fields, helping companies grow to build real value with customers. I am the co-founder and CEO of Taleee, the leader in consumer product ratings from across the Web. Taleee measures consumer satisfaction from across the Web, bringing the collective voice of the consumer to consumers and retailers everywhere. Benefits are many including saving shoppers time and money and increasing sales for ecommerce and retailers.
I have been CEO, Founder & Managing Partner of my own venture fund, VP Corp Dev for private company, VP Business Dev for Mecklermedia (now Jupiter Media), industry analyst in technology and media for Paul Kagan Associates. I’ve invested in several startups. A few have done very well. The one with the most success has been Applied Semantics, which Google acquired in 2003 and helped form the basis for Google’s Ad Sense “Ads By Google.”
In 2004 as VP Corporate Development for a startup, I helped build the largest indpendent classified ad service online and helped create one of the web’s earliest widgets, allowing anyone to create and distribute content via a GUI wizard process and web API. The widget was selected as one of the few products debuted at DEMO, where Java and TiVo both made their debuts in prior years.
I created and founded what I call “open source entrepreneuring” in 2004 on Google’s social site orkut that now has more than 1,800 members from all over the world, helping each other build digital businesses with the exchange of key assets in digital business: ideas and experience.
In 2003 I was named to the Top 150 investors by a leading UK finance publisher. From 2000 to 2004 the leading public company research distributor Zacks published my strategic insights and reports worldwide, including some early looks into China.
In an effort to help entrepreneurs navigate the digital venture realm I wrote a book, Zero Gravity 1.0 and 2.0, with both editions becoming international bestsellers in 1999 and 2001, in 8 languages. Venture investor John Doerr wrote the foreword and the book featured insights from Marc Andreessen (browser co-inventor), Jerry Yang (Yahoo co-founder) and others. Michael Bloomberg was the publisher.
Some of the magazines I’ve been featured in include WORTH, Smart Money, Dow Jones Asset Manager, Money and others. Appeared regularly on CNBC and CNET TV. Since 1994 I’ve written an informal business report that began with about 50 readers (Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo; Marc Andreessen, who led the team that invented the modern browser and Netscape; Vint Cerf, who was instrumental in creating TCP/IP -the basis for the Internet- in 1969 and today is part of Google; Joan Van Tassel, an AI expert professor, and several others at MIT, Stanford and other universities). Today, about 250,000 people read my report via email and on the Web worldwide. It’s free, to sign up for the email version send an email to steve AT steveharmon.com
My inspiration in jumping into the web in 1994 was the potential that entrepreneurs could unleash in it. That is and always will be the magic for me, watching napkin scribbles turn into real products and services for everyday people that make their lives better.
In technology for over 25 years now, in 1983 as a teenager I joined the personal computer revolution and paid my way through college by selling the VIC 20, Commodore 64, Amiga 500, Zenith Data Systems, Apple II, first Macs, and others. Always fascinated by technology and information, I earned a Bachelor of Science in Journalism from California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Ca. , where a scholarship is established in my name to help new students pay for their education.