Marc Canter
Encyclopedia
Macromedia
Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia...
. His blog
Blog
A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...
, Marc's Voice, frequently critiques other Internet luminaries and competitors, such as Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Zuckerberg
Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is an American computer programmer and Internet entrepreneur. He is best known for co-creating the social networking site Facebook, of which he is chief executive and president...
. Known for his boisterous appearances at technology conferences, Canter makes no secret of his left-leaning politics, identifying himself as a "red diaper baby
Red diaper baby
Red diaper baby describes a child of parents who were members of the United States Communist Party or were close to the party or sympathetic to its aims.-History:...
" at the 2005 Gnomedex meeting in Seattle.
Canter is also a contributor to many open standards efforts and advocates for end-user controlled digital identities and content - being a co-founder of the "Identity Gang", and a co-signer of the Social Web Users' Bill of Rights. He has consulted with global corporations including PCCW
PCCW
PCCW Limited is the holding company of HKT Group Holdings Limited, Hong Kong's premier telecommunications provider in the Information and Communications Technologies industry. PCCW also holds a majority interest in Pacific Century Premium Developments Limited...
and Intel and has written on the multimedia
Multimedia
Multimedia is media and content that uses a combination of different content forms. The term can be used as a noun or as an adjective describing a medium as having multiple content forms. The term is used in contrast to media which use only rudimentary computer display such as text-only, or...
industry, micro-content publishing
Micropublishing
Micropublishing is when an individual or group use efficient publishing and distribution techniques to publish a work intended for a specific micromarket...
and social networking.
Currently, Canter is developing software in the Greater Cleveland area and teaching classes at Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University
Case Western Reserve University is a private research university located in Cleveland, Ohio, USA...
.
Business activities
Canter is the founder and CEO of Broadband Mechanics a digital lifestyle aggregator (DLA) company. Broadband Mechanics builds tools and environments to enable online communities. It targets products at a broad user base with the hope that everyday people can make better use of Internet technologies.Broadband Mechanics provides strategic consulting and architectural design work to its clients, such as 1UP.com
1UP.com
1UP.com is a video game website owned by IGN Entertainment, a division of News Corporation. Previously, the site was owned by Ziff Davis before being sold to UGO Entertainment in 2009....
, Tribe.net
Tribe.net
tribe.net is a website that hosts an online community of friends, similar to other social networking sites. The site name is always spelled in all lower case.-History:...
, aSmallWorld
ASmallWorld
aSmallWorld is an on-line social network service similar to XING, and LinkedIn. It is an exclusive network with roughly 770,000 members that was founded by Erik and Louise Wachtmeister.-Features:...
, and AlwaysOn Network.
Canter has been involved in various startup
Startup company
A startup company or startup is a company with a limited operating history. These companies, generally newly created, are in a phase of development and research for markets...
s in the formulative stages of their product development and design. He was an early participant in Tribe.net and helped develop its "tribes" system, the first social network 'groups' technology. He consulted for Ruckus Network
Ruckus Network
Ruckus was a free ad-supported online music service available to students at all American colleges.The service was founded in 2003 by Vincent Han and David Galper; raised $41.5M from Battery Ventures, Shelter Capital, and others; was acquired in 2008 by Total Music, a joint venture between Sony and...
and Visual Media. Broadband Mechanics has also collaborated with Avid Technology
Avid Technology
Avid Technology, Inc. is an American company specializing in video and audio production technology; specifically, digital non-linear editing systems, management and distribution services. It was created in 1987 and became a publicly traded company in 1993...
.
Broadband Mechanics in 2006 released StructuredBlogging, an attempted standard for microcontent. It has released Perl
Perl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
and PHP
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose server-side scripting language originally designed for web development to produce dynamic web pages. For this purpose, PHP code is embedded into the HTML source document and interpreted by a web server with a PHP processor module, which generates the web page document...
libraries and plug-ins for WordPress
WordPress
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It is often customized into a content management system . It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 14.7% of Alexa Internet's "top 1...
and Movable Type
Movable Type
Movable Type is a weblog publishing system developed by the company Six Apart. It was publicly announced on September 3, 2001; version 1.0 was publicly released on October 8, 2001. On 12 December 2007, Movable Type was relicensed as free software under the GNU General Public License...
. StructuredBlogging has established schemas
Database schema
A database schema of a database system is its structure described in a formal language supported by the database management system and refers to the organization of data to create a blueprint of how a database will be constructed...
for events, reviews, lists, media (audio and video), people and group showcases.
History in the technology industry
Canter co-founded MacroMindMacroMind
MacroMind was an Apple Macintosh software company founded in Chicago in 1984 by Marc Canter, Jay Fenton and Mark Stephen Pierce. The company's first product was SoundVision, a combined music and graphics editor. Before the release, the graphics editor was removed, and SoundVision became MusicWorks...
in 1984 and began developing for the newly launched Apple Macintosh. MacroMind became Macromedia
Macromedia
Macromedia was an American graphics and web development software company headquartered in San Francisco, California that produced such products as Flash and Dreamweaver. Its rival, Adobe Systems, acquired Macromedia on December 3, 2005 and controls the line of Macromedia...
in 1991. He was part of the team that created the first multimedia player, the first cross-platform authoring system and the world's leading multimedia platform. Marc was considered one of the founders of multimedia, and has been a speaker, developer and evangelist in the industry for over a decade.
Prior to MacroMind, he worked for Bally-Midway programming music for videogames. He claims to have programmed one of the earliest licensed music ("Peter Gunn" for Spyhunter). He started his career after college when he went to New York City to help his friends build a music studio called "Noise New York." During this time Canter learned about laserdiscs, laser light shows, NAPLPS
NAPLPS
NAPLPS is a graphics language for use originally with videotex and teletext services. NAPLPS was developed from the Telidon system developed in Canada, with a small number of additions from AT&T...
, pro audio and video equipment, and a then-new technology called videodisc
Videodisc
Videodisc is a general term for a laser- or stylus-readable random-access circular disc that contains both audio and analog video signals recorded in an analog form...
s.
Canter was also involved in one of the first known cases of a virus
Computer virus
A computer virus is a computer program that can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. The term "virus" is also commonly but erroneously used to refer to other types of malware, including but not limited to adware and spyware programs that do not have the reproductive ability...
being distributed via commercial software. According to the March 16, 1988 edition of the Toronto Star
Toronto Star
The Toronto Star is Canada's highest-circulation newspaper, based in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Its print edition is distributed almost entirely within the province of Ontario...
, several MacroMind products shipped with virus infected media. Analysis later revealed that Canter's computer was infected with the virus while he was working on training material for the software products.
Canter and JD Lasica
J.D. Lasica
J. D. Lasica is the byline of Joseph Daniel Lasica, a social media consultant, online journalist and blogger. He is the author of Darknet: Hollywood's War Against the Digital Generation , a book about the copyright wars and the future of media.Lasica was born in Passaic, New Jersey and graduated...
founded a video sharing website, Ourmedia
Ourmedia
Ourmedia is a media archive, supported by the Internet Archive, which freely hosts any non-pornographic images, text, and video or audio clips, where this would not violate copyright laws. The website, which launched on March 21, 2005, was founded by Marc Canter and J.D. Lasica.The media archive,...
in March 2005.