Erik Schwartz

Current

• CEO/Co-Founder at Foneshow Inc

Past

• Boatbum at Ne'er do well (Self-employed)
• Investor/Founder/Interim CEO at SongStats Inc
• Head of Entertainment at Yahoo!

• Producer at vivid Studios
• Director of Content at ICTV

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Recommended

7 people have recommended Erik

Connections

477 connections

Industry

Telecommunications

Erik Schwartz’s Summary

I've been doing new media for a long time, the serial port controlled laser disc age is when I started.

I was the first person Yahoo! hired to work in Entertainment. I managed the initial strategy and creation of the core suite of Y!'s entertainment products. Y! Movies, Y! TV, Y! Music, Y! Radio. Under my tenure Y! went from having nothing in entertainment to a leading position with several verticals holding the number 1 position.

I was also the one who talked Jerry, David, Tim and Jeff into getting Yahoo! into the games business, the result of which is http://games.yahoo.com.


After a few years of being a dad, two solo transpacific races, a little consulting and mostly retirement, I'm back in the game with our VC funded mobile start up called Foneshow.

Erik Schwartz’s Experience

• CEO/Co-Founder

  Foneshow Inc

  (Privately Held; Wireless industry)

  August 2006 — Present (3 years 4 months)

  Foneshow mobilizes the radio industry and changes it from a broadcast model to a on-demand narrowcast model.
  
  Foneshow has built a telephony-based distribution platform for short-form audio (primarily news/talk radio and podcast programming). The platform leverages the cellular telephone network and enables users to subscribe to, access, publish, share, and consume short-form audio programming immediately from virtually any cell phone. The system features the very rapid propagation of programming from the creator to the consumer. Patents are pending on aspects of our technology.
  
  Stephanie Miller, Allen Hunt, and Bill Press, amongst many others use Foneshow to reach their audience.
  
  In 2009 we have been pushing into sports media. We've added NASCAR, Tony Bruno, RotoWire, and others. Many more to come.
  
  CEI Community Ventures, Masthead Venture Partners, and the Small Enterprise Growth Fund of Maine are investors in Foneshow.

• Boatbum

  Ne'er do well (Self-employed)

  (Self-Employed; Myself Only; Leisure, Travel & Tourism industry)

  2000 — 2005 (5 years )

  Surfing, sailing, traveling, eating out, going to operas

• Investor/Founder/Interim CEO

  SongStats Inc

  (Broadcast Media industry)

  December 1999 — November 2000 (1 year )

  Developed and implemented business plan for online based music research company based on advanced collaborative filtering technology. Developed relationships with record labels. Developed sales channels to radio industry. Implicit data derived from user behavior is far more valuable than self reported behavior (the way traditional music research is done).
  
  Things went well, but we were undercapitalized and late 2000 was not the best time to try to be raising funds.

• Head of Entertainment

  Yahoo!

  (Public Company; YHOO; Internet industry)

  1997 — 2000 (3 years )

  I was the first head of Entertainment for Yahoo! In that role I created Yahoo! Games. In addition, I personally launched or managed the team that launched:
  
  Yahoo! Games
  Yahoo! Movies
  Yahoo! TV
  Yahoo! Radio
  Yahoo! Entertainment
  Yahoo! Comics
  Yahoo! Astrology
  
  Responsible for P&L, overall product strategy, and general operations and management of entertainment verticals, including managing advertising, downloads and premium product lines.
  
  I also performed CPR on Yahoo!/MTV unfURLed and actually got it launched and out the door after it had staggered along under a variety of others for a year or so. The operation was a success but the patient died.

• Producer

  vivid Studios

  (Computer Software industry)

  1996 — 1996 (less than a year)

  Nice bunch of people, very talented. The company had cash flow problems.
  
  I worked on the vivid Travel Network project. It was WAY ahead of its time.

• Director of Content

  ICTV

  (Privately Held; Broadcast Media industry)

  1990 — 1996 (6 years )

  I was employee number 7 at this interactive television start up.
  
  1995-96 I was Director of Content, leading a team that did some of the early work putting internet content on TV.
  
  1992-95 I was the Product Manager for the Cox Cable Omaha Video on Demand trial.
  
  From 1990-92 I was a software engineer developing user interfaces for use in an NTSC environment. In this role I did some of the seminal work in interactive television applications and interfaces.