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About Jeffrey Vander Clute

Jeffrey Vander Clute is a consultant to the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism and technology lead on its The Information Valet Project.

Vander Clute is an Internet social-networking and database programmer engineer and business-development executive. He has written software for Web 1.0, 2.0, and 3.0, and has extensive experience with search engines, large-scale databases, and other technologies fundamental to media. He is co-founder and CEO of Semesphere, Inc., which developed several notable social media and social networking applications and is now bringing the social web together with the semantic web. Semesphere is cash-flow positive and has prominent investors on three continents.

He was the principal developer of the Internet’s first mass-market social-network, Tripod Inc., which grew to 33 million users worldwide and is profitable to this day. When Lycos Inc., acquired Tripod Inc. for $58 million, VanderClute was manager of international business development for the Lycos search engine. He was next VP of information systems of eZiba.com, a transactional website which sold craft objects made by Third World artisans via a web database in partnership with Amazon.com. In that role, Mr. Vander Clute was responsible for building and managing eZiba’s massively parallel relational database transaction system, and deployed an Oracle-based e-commerce system with warehouse integration. He has sold medical-imaging software for a global teleradiology network based in Australia, and served as an advisor and technology executive for Clickshare Service Corp. and is familiar with that company's patented distributed-user-management technology> Vander Clute graduated summa cum laude from Williams College with a B.A. degree in mathematics. He lives in Palo Alto, Calif.