Today we are proud to announce Robert Scoble, one of the world’s most prominent futurists, is joining the team at UploadVR as our entrepreneur in residence. In joining UploadVR, Scoble will play a big role in a number of our different business properties from providing his voice on our site and helping build new media properties to working with companies in the Upload Collective, our hybrid co-working and incubation space for AR and VR companies that opens on March 15.
For those who don’t know Scoble, or only remember him from his journey with Google Glass, he has been one of the leading voices in technology for the last decade. During his tenure at Microsoft from 2003-2006, Scoble served as the company’s technical evangelist while growing his blog The Scobleizer. His unique style of engagement with the developers engendered him to the geek community in a way that proceeded the personalities of social media leading The Economist to say in 2005 that “he has made Microsoft, with its history of monopolistic bullying, appear marginally but noticeably less evil to the outside world.”
Scoble’s role as an evangelist with Microsoft eventually lead to him to dive full force into media, looking to stretch the boundaries of coverage to bring personal and easy going looks into the worlds of technology start ups and leaders. His journey eventually led him to join Fast Company where he started a tech show shot entirely on phones, not dissimilar to the Periscoping of today – just eight years ahead of schedule and at the dawn of social media.
Scoble has a tendency to rest firmly in the “innovator” camp on the adoption curve.
After leaving Fast Company, Scoble joined Rackspace where he served as the company’s futurist. During his time there Scoble began to adopt social media as his main platform, growing his Facebook from only about 13,000 followers to 672,000 today by being first, or early, with many technology startup’s introductions. For example, Siri was launched in his son’s bedroom.
I remember when I first met Robert Scoble early last year at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara. We were helping organize the event had convinced him to come down and be a part of an AR vs. VR debate. At the time he had only just started looking into the space, having had his first watershed moment with VR at the 2014 Web Summit a few months prior. The debate itself raucous, fun and at times a little chaotic but it was filled with insight – and it proved to be a perfect encapsulation of Scoble himself. We shook hands shortly after he exited the stage and started talking further about the future, exchanged cards, and went along our merry way.
We kept in touch over the following months, closely tracking the progress of the space and checking in with each other occasionally. At the time neither of us knew where the journey would take us but for Robert, the future of AR and VR was beginning to become clear as our passions clearly aligned.
That passion came to a head after CES this year, where the ‘year of VR’ kicked off. Shortly after we announced the Collective, Scoble and I began talking about ways in which we could work together to bring as much attention, as quickly as possible to this growing and important industry. We both had the same mission, to inspire the masses with virtual and augmented reality in order to further accelerate the industry’s growth.
VR and AR are the biggest platform shift in computing since the Apple II, it is something that we both passionately agree on. It is the next evolution in human interaction, the next step in our evolving relationship with technology. We are poised to see a cultural shift unlike any seen since the 60’s as these technologies become integrated into our daily lives and change the way we interact with our world forever.
Over the next few months Robert will be working with myself and the rest of the editorial team to build a number of fun new media properties to help share the magic and stories of these new mediums with the world. I am looking forward to seeing where this journey takes us.
– Will Mason, Co-Founder & Editor in Chief, UploadVR.com
