Florian Brody is an Austrian/American

digital media In mass communication, digital media is any media (communication), communication media that operates in conjunction with various encoded machine-readable data formats. Digital content can be created, viewed, distributed, modified, listened to, an ...

creator, inventor, writer, public speaker, academic, and global business consultant. He is best known for his contributions to the invention and development of

Expanded Books The Expanded Books Project was a project by The Voyager Company during 1991, that investigated how a book could be presented on a computer screen in a way that would be both familiar and useful to regular book readers. The project focused on perfec ...

, an early form of

E-books An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

, at the

Voyager Company The Voyager Company was a pioneer in CD-ROM production in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was founded in 1984 by four partners: Jon Turell, Bill Becker, Aleen Stein, and Robert Stein in Santa Monica, California, and later moved to New York City. Th ...

, and for his writings and public speaking about digital media innovation and marketing, including

TEDx talks TED Conferences, LLC (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is an American-Canadian non-profit media organization that posts international talks online for free distribution under the slogan "Ideas Change Everything" (previously "Ideas Worth Sprea ...

Austria Austria, formally the Republic of Austria, is a landlocked country in Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine Federal states of Austria, states, of which the capital Vienna is the List of largest cities in Aust ...

, as well as his 1999 essay "The Medium is the Memory," originally published in

MIT Press The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...

's ''The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media'', edited by

Peter Lunenfeld Peter Lunenfeld (born 1962, in New York City) is a critic and theorist of digital media, digital humanities, and urban humanities. He is a professor and the Vice Chair of the Design Media Arts department at UCLA, director of the Institute for Techn ...

. Brody is a certified executive leadership coach, and supports European start-up businesses looking to enter the U.S. market. He served as principal at The Halo Agency from 2013 to 2017.

Career

Digital media innovation

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Brody was head of the Expanded Books Project at the

and was involved in the development and creation of their "expanded books", originally designed to be read on the then-new Apple

PowerBook 100 The PowerBook 100 is a notebook-sized laptop computer designed and manufactured by Sony for Apple Computer and introduced on October 21, 1991, at the COMDEX computer expo in Las Vegas, Nevada. Priced at US$2,500 with external floppy driv ...

. The Voyager Company released their first expanded books on

floppy disk A floppy disk or floppy diskette (casually referred to as a floppy, a diskette, or a disk) is a type of disk storage composed of a thin and flexible disk of a magnetic storage medium in a square or nearly square plastic enclosure lined with a ...

for the PowerBook in 1992, and presented them at that year's

MacWorld Expo Macworld/iWorld (originally Macworld) was an information technology trade show with conference tracks dedicated to Apple's Mac platform. It was held annually in the United States during January. Originally ''Macworld Expo'' and then ''Macworld Con ...

. The books on this original disk were

Jurassic Park ''Jurassic Park'', later referred to as ''Jurassic World'', is an American science fiction media franchise created by Michael Crichton, centered on a disastrous attempt to create a theme park of De-extinction#Cloning, cloned dinosaurs. It bega ...

Michael Crichton John Michael Crichton (; October 23, 1942 – November 4, 2008) was an American author, screenwriter and filmmaker. His books have sold over 200 million copies worldwide, and over a dozen have been adapted into films. His literary works heavil ...

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' is a Science fiction comedy, comedy science fiction franchise created by Douglas Adams. Originally a The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series), radio sitcom broadcast over two series on BBC ...

Douglas Adams Douglas Noel Adams (11 March 1952 – 11 May 2001) was an English author, humorist, and screenwriter, best known as the creator of ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy''. Originally a 1978 BBC radio comedy, ''The Hitchhiker's Guide to the ...

, and

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (also known as ''Alice in Wonderland'') is an 1865 English Children's literature, children's novel by Lewis Carroll, a mathematics university don, don at the University of Oxford. It details the story of a ...

Lewis Carroll Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet, mathematician, photographer and reluctant Anglicanism, Anglican deacon. His most notable works are ''Alice ...

. Brody's public statements at the time on the Voyager Company's early expanded books, or 'e-books', were that he believed they were more of an experiment than a definitive 'product', paving the way for future versions of

e-books An ebook (short for electronic book), also spelled as e-book or eBook, is a book publication made available in electronic form, consisting of text, images, or both, readable on the flat-panel display of computers or other electronic devices. A ...

for the next generation of less expensive, more lightweight, and more high-powered portable computers.

Digital evangelism

Brody has spoken about digital media innovation and marketing in both Europe and the US. He has done multiple

in Austria.

Business and consultant work

Brody has been a principal partner at The Halo Agency, which provides business consultation to European start-up tech-based businesses looking to enter the U.S. market, founding president o
ASciNA
Austrian Scientists and Scholars in North America, Vice President of Marketing at Visuvi, Inc., and Vice President of Marketing at Envizio, a company that he co-founded to facilitate technology business transactions. He has also served as Director of Marketing at

Amazon.com Amazon.com, Inc., doing business as Amazon, is an American multinational technology company engaged in e-commerce, cloud computing, online advertising, digital streaming, and artificial intelligence. Founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos in Bellevu ...

's search and advertising development subsidiary

A9.com A9.com was a subsidiary of Amazon that developed search engine and search advertising technology. A9 was based in Palo Alto, California, with teams in Seattle, Bangalore, Beijing, Dublin, Iași, Munich and Tokyo. A9 had development efforts in a ...

, was head of Marketing Communications at

YouSendIt Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send, receive, digitally sign, and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013. The company's early focu ...

(now called

Hightail Hightail, formerly YouSendIt, is a cloud service that lets users send, receive, digitally sign, and synchronize files. YouSendIt.com and YouSendIt Inc. were founded in 2004; the company renamed itself Hightail in 2013. The company's early focu ...

), and served as Director of Business Development at Red Herring Magazine.

Academia

In 1999, Brody published his essay "The Medium is the Memory" in

's ''The Digital Dialectic: New Essays on New Media'', edited by

, where he analyzed the history of how society has evolved different mediums of 'remembering', from oral history to modern-day digital records. He studied Computer Linguistics in Vienna, where he grew up, and began his career working at the

Cinémathèque Française A cinematheque is an archive of films and film-related objects with an exhibition venue. Similarly to a book library (bibliothèque in French), a cinematheque is responsible for preserving and making available to the public film heritage. Typically ...

in Paris, a library with one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world.

Bibliography

* "Alte und neue Inhalte – können wir das Web heute schon verstehen? Festhalten und Loslassen im Kontext des Digitalen." In: Marion Fugléwicz-Bren: ''Die Philosophen kommen – The Next Chapter''. Hamburg: tredition, 2014. Pbd. 232 S. * "How Green is the Silcon Valley?" In: ''Economics of Communication. Information Technology for Sustainability''. 2014. forthcoming * "Philosophie legt die Steine in den Weg, die es interessant machen, den Weg zu gehen." In: Marion Fugléwicz-Bren: ''Die Philosophen kommen''. Hamburg: tredition, 2013. Pbd. 232 S. . * "Eschatologische Vernetzung. Das World Wide Web als Hoffnungsraum Paralipomena zum Heilsanspruch des Internet." in: Fugléwicz-Bren et al.: ''ZukunftsWebBuch 2010''. Chancen und Risiken des Web 3.0. o.O.: edition mono/monochrom, 2010. 978-3-9502372-7-6 * "Was kommt nach Web2.0? (Und was kam vorher?) Digitale Medien-Start-Ups im Silicon Valley." In: Michael A. Herzog (Hrsg.) ''Prozessgestaltung in der Medienproduktion.'' Berlin: Gito, 2009 * ''The Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing: Multimedia Publishing.'' New York:

Columbia University Press Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's la ...

, 2003. * "The Medium is the Memory." In: ''The Digital Dialectic. New Essays on New Media''

, 1999. * ''Interaction Design. State of the Art and Future Developments. An argument for information design.''

Rockport Publishers The Quarto Group is a global illustrated book publishing group founded in 1976. It is domiciled in the United States and listed on the London Stock Exchange. Quarto creates and sells illustrated books for adults and children, across 50 countri ...

1998-. * ''Books the Next Generation—Reading on the Electronic Frontier.'' Heidelberg: Springer,1996. * "Tabula Rasa". In: ''Cutting Edge Web Design'',

1998. * ''My Home is my Memory is my Home.'' Mediamatic, Amsterdam 1995. () * ''Bibliographie der Bibliographien der Fimliteratur." Maske und Kothurn Vol 21. Nr 4 (December 197

' * "How Virtual is Reality?" In: Tony Feldman (ed.), ''Proceedings of the First Annual Conference on Virtual Reality 91''. London: Meckler

References

External links

Brody - The Medium is the Memory

Interview on Silicon Valley Start-Ups
{{DEFAULTSORT:Brody, Florian Living people Austrian businesspeople Computer designers Austrian inventors Digital media educators 1953 births Austrian emigrants to the United States