For nearly thirty years, Richard Gingras has led highly-regarded efforts in the development of online services and new media. These endeavors range from pioneering uses of satellite networking for television, the first applications of television signals for data distribution, both pre-Web and Web-based online services, and the creation of various platform technologies.

Gingras is CEO of Salon Media Group which operates the popular and acclaimed Salon.com, the blogging community OpenSalon.com, and the pioneering virtual community The Well. Gingras has had a long association with Salon having assembled its initial seed financing in 1995.

Gingras has long guided the development of new products, new technologies, and new companies, often as an active board member and strategic advisor with early stage ventures. He also served, in 2007 and 2008, as a strategic advisor to the senior team at Google.

Gingras was co-founder, CEO and chairman of Goodmail Systems, a venture that provides certified email services to thousands of online retailers and financial service companies. Other ventures include Digital Railroad, a distribution marketplace for photojournalists and commercial photographers, Audio Mill (merged into Real Networks, April, 2002), technology incubator ChanceTechAV, web applications platform provider Laszlo Systems, custom book publisher MyPublisher, broadband applications platform developer Sugar Media (merged into 2Wire, September, 2003), and Salon.com among others.

Gingras also successfully explored the intersection of public policy, online commerce and parody with the creation of the Total Information Awareness Gift Shop, a satirical poke at government efforts to secretly mine data from vast arrays of corporate and governmental databases. Proceeds of the TIA Gift Shop continue to go to the ACLU.

In the non-profit arena, Gingras serves on the board of the World Computer Exchange, which diverts used computers from landfills in the United States and places them with educational facilities in developing countries. He has also worked toward the development of educational and public policy programs with the communications and journalism departments of San Francisco State University, UC Berkeley, and Stanford University.

From early 1996 to mid 2000, Gingras led online service efforts at Excite@Home as Senior Vice President and General Manager of the company's consumer-focused product division, Excite Studios. With dozens of products -- including the Excite narrowband and @Home broadband portals -- and 600 employees, the media division generated over 160 million daily page views and garnered $250 million in annual revenue.

Will Hearst brought Gingras to the pre-merger @Home Network in January, 1996, as its founding vice president of programming with global responsibility for @Home's broadband-enabled, media-rich online services. @Home was founded by the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins and a number of major cable companies to offer high-speed Internet access using the infrastructure of cable television systems. Gingras launched broadband online services in the United States, Canada, Australia, and the Netherlands.

At Apple Computer in the early 1990's Gingras led the development of the online service eWorld. A pre-Web online service, eWorld was built with technology licensed from AOL and it introduced many online service innovations -- in overall product design, in publishing infrastructures, in instant messaging, and in organizing and presenting 3rd-party branded content - innovations that were later adopted by AOL when it acquired eWorld in 1996.

Gingras's work in online services reaches back to the very beginning of interactive media in the US. In 1979, he was the creator of the first interactive online news magazine - done in partnership with CBS, NBC, and PBS and delivered to several hundred test households using interactive TV set-top box technology known as broadcast teletext. From 1987 to 1992, Gingras was the founder and president of MediaWorks, an Apple-funded startup that developed early news-agenting and executive support software for Fortune 500 corporations.

Gingras began his career in television, holding various positions with PBS, KCET/Los Angeles, and NBC during the 1970's. He is a 1973 graduate of Boston College.