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Andy Baio

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Andy Baio
Andy Baio in 2012
Born1977 (age 46–47)
Occupations
  • Blogger
  • technologist
Known for
Websitewaxy.org

Andy Baio (born 1977[1]) is an American technologist and blogger. He is the co-founder of the XOXO festival, founder of the Upcoming social calendar website, a former CTO of Kickstarter, and the author of the Waxy.org blog.

Career

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In 2003, while working as a webmaster at a Texas-based financial company, Baio launched the Upcoming collaborative event calendar.[2][3] The site was acquired by Yahoo for $2 million in 2005 and Baio joined the company as the site's Technical Director.[3] In 2007, Baio announced his departure from Yahoo.[4][5]

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.[6] Baio later joined the staff as Chief Technical Officer in July 2009,[7] stepping down in November 2010 to join Expert Labs.[8] After Yahoo closed Upcoming and offered to sell the domain back to Baio, he launched a Kickstarter campaign that surpassed its $30,000 goal in May 2014 to revive the site.[9][3]

In June 2017, Baio joined the Fuzzco creative studio as Technology Director.[10]

In October 2018, Baio and his fellow XOXO festival cofounder Andy McMillan announced they would be taking over Drip, a creator funding platform that Kickstarter had acquired in 2016. Kickstarter continued to run the platform while Baio and McMillan took it over, and Kickstarter provided the duo with seed funding. Baio and McMillan started a public-benefit corporation, separate from Kickstarter, to run the project.[11] However, in mid-2019, they shut it down before launching and returned the remaining funding to Kickstarter, saying that they could not find a way to sustainably run the business without exposing the creators who would rely on it to too much risk.[12]

In 2021, Baio launched the Skittish virtual event platform, where participants could move around as virtual animal avatars and interact with other inhabitants via spatial voice chat.[13] Wired described the project as "equal parts audio chat, serendipity, and Animal Crossing."[14] The platform was funded with a grant from Grant for the Web,[15] a program in turn funded by Mozilla, Creative Commons, and a micropayments startup.[16] Skittish shut down in December 2022.[17]

Media

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Baio was involved in the early dissemination of the Star Wars Kid viral video, which depicted teenager Ghyslain Raza clumsily emulating martial arts moves for the camera.[18] In response to the negative attention the boy received, Baio and another blogger, Jish Mukerji, organized a fundraiser for Raza which gathered almost $1,000 from about 100 donors.[18][19] In March 2022, Baio met Raza and apologized to him for amplifying the video. Baio later said in the documentary Star Wars Kid: The Rise of the Digital Shadows that he had "enormous regret about posting the video." Raza accepted his apology, saying that Baio "provides a beautiful lesson of humanity that a good person can make a mistake and that mistake can have very important consequences but that, at the end of the day, Andy could be like any one of us."[20]

When the parody cartoon House of Cosbys was taken down from its original site due to a cease and desist letter from Bill Cosby's attorney, Baio placed the videos on his own website.[21] 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.[22]

In 2009, Baio produced Kind of Bloop, a chiptune tribute album commemorating the 50th anniversary of Miles Davis' 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. 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.[23]

Baio has written for Wired magazine[24] and The New York Times,[25] and was a staffer on R. U. Sirius' online magazine GettingIt.com.[26] Baio coined the term supercut in 2008, which in 2017 became known through the song "Supercut" by singer Lorde.[27]

Baio has blogged at Waxy.org since 2002, and is considered to be one of the first linkbloggers.[28]

XOXO festival

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In early 2012, Baio and Andy McMillan co-founded the XOXO festival, which describes itself as "an experimental festival celebrating independent artists and creators working on the internet". The conference was held annually in Portland, Oregon, from 2012 to 2019 and in 2024. The conferences were largely funded via prepaid tickets and other contributions, including via Kickstarter.[29][30] Baio describes the conference as a "consensual hallucination", using William Gibson's 1984 description for cyberspace.[28]

In 2015, Baio and McMillan worked to open Outpost, a shared, pay-what-you-can workspace in Portland for members of the XOXO community.[31][32] Outspace was open from February to December 2016, but ultimately shuttered due to high rental costs.[33]

Personal life

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Baio was born in 1977. His mother is journalism professor Toni Allen, who was the head of the journalism department at Oxnard College.[34][35]

Baio lives in Portland, Oregon.[32] He has a son, who was born in 2004.[36] Baio is colorblind.[37]

References

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  1. ^ Baio, Andy (December 9, 2014). "Playing With My Son". The Message. Medium. Archived from the original on July 19, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  2. ^ "Online Diary". The New York Times. November 6, 2003. Archived from the original on July 27, 2018. Retrieved July 27, 2018.
  3. ^ a b c Tate, Ryan (May 8, 2014). "Kickstarter Brought This App Back From Yahoo's Corporate Hell". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on May 10, 2023. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  4. ^ "Upcoming.org creator leaving Yahoo". November 12, 2007. Archived from the original on December 15, 2007. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
  5. ^ Russell, Terrence (November 12, 2007). "Upcoming's Founder on Going From Giants to Startups (and Back Again)". Wired. Archived from the original on December 16, 2007. Retrieved December 12, 2007.
  6. ^ "Kickstarter | waxy.org". Archived from the original on 2009-12-28. Retrieved 2009-12-24.
  7. ^ Kickstarter's New CTO, Andy Baio Archived July 24, 2009, at the Wayback Machine
  8. ^ "Joining Expert Labs". Archived from the original on November 15, 2010. Retrieved November 17, 2010.
  9. ^ "Andy Baio crowdfunds $30,000 in 90 minutes to relaunch community event site Upcoming". The Next Web. May 7, 2014. Archived from the original on June 11, 2018. Retrieved June 18, 2018.
  10. ^ "Fuzzco and Me". Waxy.org. August 15, 2017. Archived from the original on August 15, 2017. Retrieved August 16, 2017.
  11. ^ Hatmaker, Taylor (October 24, 2018). "The team behind XOXO is taking over Kickstarter's Drip crowdfunding community". TechCrunch. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  12. ^ Liptak, Andrew (June 15, 2019). "XOXO shut down its subscription platform before it launched". The Verge. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  13. ^ Hatmaker, Taylor (May 18, 2021). "Skittish is what you'd get if you crossed Animal Crossing with Clubhouse". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on December 6, 2023. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  14. ^ Goode, Lauren (February 18, 2021). "Online Meetups Are Sad, but What If You Were a Cute Animal?". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Archived from the original on August 1, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  15. ^ Peters, Jay (February 17, 2021). "Skittish is a virtual event space built from the lessons of the pandemic". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 2, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  16. ^ Melendez, Steven (September 16, 2019). "Mozilla and Creative Commons want to reimagine the internet without ads, and they have $100M to do it". Fast Company. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  17. ^ Baio, Andy (October 27, 2022). "Winding Down Skittish". Skittish. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  18. ^ a b Kahney, Leander (May 19, 2003). "'Star Wars Kid' Gets Bucks From Blogs". Wired. Archived from the original on May 20, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  19. ^ "'Star Wars Kid' becomes unwilling Internet star". USA Today. The Associated Press. August 22, 2003. Archived from the original on March 8, 2008. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  20. ^ Rowe, Daniel J. (March 30, 2022). "'Star Wars Kid' reflects on his 2003 viral video, the media circus and human nature". CTV News. Archived from the original on April 21, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  21. ^ Waxy.org: House of Cosbys, Mirrored Archived June 29, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
  22. ^ Miller, Lia (March 6, 2006). "Cosby's Lawyers See No Flattery in an Imitation". The New York Times. Archived from the original on July 24, 2015. Retrieved February 5, 2017.
  23. ^ Chalk, Andy (June 24, 2011). "Chiptune Cover Album Leads to Huge Legal Bill". The Escapist. Archived from the original on June 26, 2011. Retrieved June 28, 2011.
  24. ^ "Wired 15.04: START". Wired. Archived from the original on 2012-10-24. Retrieved 2017-03-05.
  25. ^ "Volunteers Put the Economist Into Chinese (Published 2009)". The New York Times. Archived from the original on November 26, 2022.
  26. ^ Gettingit.com: Andrew Baio Archived October 16, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
  27. ^ Tiffany, Kaitlyn (June 16, 2017). "Andy Baio on sort of, kind of inspiring a Lorde song". The Verge. Archived from the original on December 28, 2017. Retrieved October 5, 2018.
  28. ^ a b Newton, Casey (September 16, 2014). "How XOXO Festival is pushing the web forward". The Verge. Archived from the original on August 27, 2017. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  29. ^ Wortham, Jenna (May 25, 2012). "XOXO aims to be an alternative to South by Southwest". New York Times Bits Blog. Archived from the original on January 20, 2013. Retrieved June 12, 2012.
  30. ^ Wortham, Jenna (September 14, 2012). "XOXO Fest, An Experimental Tech Conference, Gets Underway". New York Times Bits Blog. Archived from the original on December 26, 2012. Retrieved October 25, 2012.
  31. ^ Bell, Jon. "Portland's XOXO Festival lands 13,000-square-foot year-round home in Central Eastside". Portland Business Journal. Archived from the original on February 25, 2021. Retrieved January 22, 2016.
  32. ^ a b D'Cruz, Andrew (June 13, 2016). "This Shared Portland Office Could Save Our Souls (and Our Wallets)". Portland Monthly. Archived from the original on March 21, 2023. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  33. ^ "XOXO Outpost". XOXO Outpost. XOXO. Archived from the original on December 6, 2016. Retrieved December 30, 2016.
  34. ^ Baio, Andy (March 8, 2005). "My Mom Fights to Save Community College Journalism". Waxy.org. Archived from the original on February 10, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  35. ^ Doctorow, Cory (March 8, 2005). "Waxy and his mom trying to save journalism program in SoCal's Oxnard College". Boing Boing. Archived from the original on September 24, 2015. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  36. ^ Plunkett, Luke (December 10, 2014). "Father Makes Son Play Through Video Game History, Chronologically". Kotaku. Archived from the original on March 11, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
  37. ^ Baio, Andy (April 7, 2023). "This is what it looks like to be colorblind". The Verge. Archived from the original on July 3, 2024. Retrieved September 1, 2024.
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