Andy Baio is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the

XOXO Festival XOXO is an annual festival and conference held in Portland, Oregon, that describes itself as "an experimental festival for independent artists who live and work online". XOXO was founded in 2012 by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan with funding from p ...

, founder of Upcoming.org, a former CTO of Kickstarter and the author of the Waxy.org blog.

Career

In 2003, Baio launched

Upcoming Upcoming (formerly Upcoming.org) is a social event calendar website that launched in 2003, founded by Andy Baio. Features Upcoming combines features of an event calendar and a social networking site. Primarily, the site is a searchable, brow ...

, a collaborative event calendar. The site was acquired by

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds managed by Apollo Global Manage ...

for an undisclosed sum in 2005 and Baio joined the company as the site's Technical Director. In 2007, Baio announced his departure from Yahoo. In September 2008, Baio joined the board of directors of Kickstarter, a crowdfunding website that helps people with project ideas to connect with potential funders. Baio later joined the staff as Chief Technical Officer in July 2009, stepping down in November 2010 to join

Expert Labs Expert Labs is a non-profit technology incubator intended to aid government access expertise from interested members of the public. Part of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it was formed in November 2009, following discussion ...

. In June 2017, Baio joined Fuzzco as Technology Director. After Yahoo offered to sell the

domain back to Baio, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that hit its $30,000 goal in May 2014 to revive the site.

Media

Baio was involved in the dissemination of the Star Wars Kid video, which depicted teenager Ghyslain Raza clumsily emulating martial arts moves for the camera. In response to the negative attention the boy received, Baio and another blogger, Jish Mukerji, organized a fundraiser which gathered up $1,000 from about 100 donors. In March 2022, Baio met Raza and apologised to him for posting the video. Raza accepted his apology. When the parody cartoon ''

House of Cosbys ''House of Cosbys'' is an American animated sitcom created by Justin Roiland for the film festival Channel 101. The series centers on Mitchell Reynolds (Jeff B. Davis, Jeff Davis), who builds a cloning machine to make duplicates of his favorite co ...

'' was taken down from its original site due to a cease and desist letter from

Bill Cosby William Henry Cosby Jr. ( ; born July 12, 1937) is an American stand-up comedian, actor, and media personality. He made significant contributions to American and African-American culture, and is well known in the United States for his eccentric ...

's attorney, Baio placed the videos on his own website. Baio later received a similar cease and desist letter but refused to comply, citing fair use and decrying what he termed "a special kind of discrimination against amateur creators on the Internet", since Cosby had often been parodied in the mainstream media. In 2009, he produced ''Kind of Bloop'', a chiptune

tribute album An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early 20th century as individual 78 rpm records c ...

commemorating the 50th anniversary of

Miles Davis Miles Dewey Davis III (May 26, 1926September 28, 1991) was an American trumpeter, bandleader, and composer. He is among the most influential and acclaimed figures in the history of jazz and 20th-century music. Davis adopted a variety of musi ...

' '' Kind of Blue''. The album's cover was a pixel art version of the original album's cover, which consisted of a photograph taken by

Jay Maisel Jay Maisel (born January 18, 1931) is an American photographer. His awards include the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Society of Media Photographers,

. Attorneys representing Maisel demanded damages and that the resulting image be removed from the chiptune album, resulting in a settlement of $32,500 from Baio. Baio has also written for ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...

'' magazine and ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

'', and was a staffer on R. U. Sirius' online magazine GettingIt.com. Baio coined the term supercut in 2008, which in 2017 became known through the song "Supercut" by singer Lorde. In early 2012, Baio and Andy McMillan co-founded the

, celebrating independent artists and technologists. The conference has been held in

Portland, Oregon Portland (, ) is a port city in the Pacific Northwest and the list of cities in Oregon, largest city in the U.S. state of Oregon. Situated at the confluence of the Willamette River, Willamette and Columbia River, Columbia rivers, Portland is ...

, since 2012. The conferences have been largely funded via prepaid tickets and other contributions, including via Kickstarter.

References

External links

Official site
– main blog
Kind of Bloop
{{DEFAULTSORT:Baio, Andy American bloggers 1977 births Living people